• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1325 0

under his weapons. With a belly-up slew to starboard, he seized the coralskipper in his sights and tightened his middle finger on the stick’s auxiliary trigger button. With the X-wing’s lasers cycling more rapidly than they would have in single-fire mode, each bolt burned with a scarlet intensity that belied its reduced strength. Dazzled by the task of distinguishing the heavier, more lethal bolts from the hail of essentially harmless bolts loosed by the quadded lasers, the skip’s dovin basal failed, and a packet of Eyttyn’s energy darts found their mark.

The coralskipper cracked apart like pumice and disappeared.

Blue Six avenged, Eyttyn raced through the Yuuzhan Vong’s debris cloud of glowing motes to close on another coralskipper. A sustained, convergent burst of flickers from the X-wing’s wingtips caught the enemy unprepared, destroying him, as well.

With Blue Squadron down to nine fighters, Eyttyn formed everyone up into a trailing wedge. But no sooner had they closed on the frigate than they instantly became targets of its craterlike gun ports. Another X-wing was annihilated, then another, although by then Eyttyn was in position to make a strafing run. Jinking to port, he paid out a pair of proton torpedoes, only to watch in utter stupefaction as the scintillating spheres soared away into empty space.

He had grown accustomed to seeing laser beams and torpedoes swallowed by gravitic anomalies, but this was something different. It was as if the enemy ship itself had disappeared.

He glanced frantically around the canopy, thinking that he had somehow become disoriented and that the frigate was actually above him. Star-swept darkness met his gaze in all directions. Data scrolls from the R2 were telling him that the Yuuzhan Vong ship had moved, but the droid was obviously mistaken. No vessel could move that quickly—even when making microjumps.

“Where’d the blasted thing go?” he asked over the net.

“Don’t know, Commander,” Blue Two responded. “I was right on your Six when it disappeared—in a blink.”

“Cloaking device?” Blue Eleven suggested.

“Well, it vanished like it was cloaked,” Eyttyn said, “but I figure we’d still pick up residual gravitic traces from a ship that massive.”

“Hyperspace,” Blue Ten interjected.

“Not without taking me with it,” Eyttyn told him. “It’s—”

“Commander,” Blue Two cut him off. “I’ve located it.”

Eyttyn aimed the X-wing’s scopes at the coordinates Blue Two supplied, and sure enough, the frigate was there—two thousand kilometers away.

Blue Eleven offered a stunned whistle. “That ship jumped two thousand clicks in a split second.”

Eyttyn forced a breath and tightened his grip on the controls. “Adjust course,” he ordered. “If it’s a game of tag they want, it’s a game of tag they’ll get.”

The Millennium Falcon burst into realspace on the far side of Bilbringi’s profusion of orbital habitats and heavily mined planetoids. Leia and Luke had the forward seats, with Mara behind Luke in the chair normally assigned to a communications officer and C-3PO in the navigator’s chair. R2-D2 had planted himself at the rear of the cockpit, with his grasping arm clamped to a slender conduit.

In the fan-shaped viewport, the Queen of Empire was well off to starboard. Rimward, local space was a pyrotechnic welter of laser beams, radiant projectiles, fusial thrusters, and blossoming explosions.

“Unidentified Corellian freighter,” an incensed voice barked over the comm, “this is Captain Jorlen of the New Republic cruiser-carrier Thurse. You’ve jumped into a combat zone. I suggest you hold fast or return to wherever you came from.”

“Captain Jorlen,” Leia said, “this is Ambassador Organa Solo.”

“Ambassador, what in blazes are you doing here?” The captain sounded surprised, though hardly cheered. “And when is that husband of yours going to get around to installing an authorized transponder?”

“I’ll ask him when I see him, Captain. He’s aboard the Queen of Empire. We’ve come to lend a hand, if you’ll have our help.”

“Negative, Ambassador. I request you hold your position. We’ve got a Yuuzhan Vong frigate