Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 06_ Balance Point - Kathy Tyers [129]
“No. What you did,” Leia managed. “Harder. Furious with me, but … came back.”
Jaina made a wry face, then bent to kiss her mother’s cheek. “Lie still. We’ll get you out of here.”
“But … Duro … Basbakhan …”
“We’re evacuating,” Jacen said. What had happened to her other Noghri? “Basbakhan?” he asked.
Leia’s eyelids fell shut. Jacen looked up at Jaina, worried.
“There’s a sedative in that drip,” Jaina explained. “Otherwise she’d roll down, crawl to the quad guns, and bleed to death.” In her voice, Jacen heard heartfelt respect.
“Right,” he said. If Basbakhan was alive on Duro, he pitied the Yuuzhan Vong. “Then it’s you and me for the guns.”
“Take a quad,” Jaina exclaimed, flinging herself away from the bunk. “I’ll join Dad. Coralskipper derby, three-way!”
“Mara, Luke? Duro Defense Force? This is the Millennium Falcon, escorting a big hauler. Last ship out of Gateway, coming up at you.”
Mara eyed her sensors. Vectoring south, accelerating ponderously, came a big block of a hauler, a smaller freight ship, and three YT-1300s. The lead freighter, the one that reflected no light, wove back and forth in a very unfreighterly fashion.
Luke’s voice: “Han, is she all right?”
Han sounded tense. “She’s hurt bad.”
No surprise there, either. If Mara had felt it through the Force, Luke must’ve, too.
“The kids are taking care of her, but—what?” Han’s voice faded momentarily, then came back. “Can’t talk. These haulers could use a few more escorts, though.”
“On our way.” Mara snapped off the comm and studied her sensors. Whether by skill or by Solo luck, Han had herded his charges onto the vector that was seeing the least action.
An enemy gunship appeared ahead of them, though. Almost instantly, the expected dovin basal anomaly appeared on Mara’s sensors. She fired a storm of short bursts into it, loading it as heavily as possible. Not far to starboard, Luke’s X-wing took a run at the gunship, his guns linked to fire dual bursts—two from above, then two below—then a solid quad burst.
The gunship swerved off course, ignoring the blocky transport to deal with its attackers. Mara pelted the singularity, keeping its shields busy, decelerating to keep from being drawn in.
As Luke set up for a second run, she spotted another X-wing coming in behind him—but also a tetrahedral flight of coralskippers. Stars spun as Mara jinked her ship, evading plasma bursts, still concentrating her fire on that gunship. Sensors showed another anomaly coming up toward her, projected by the coralskippers to devour her shields.
“Luke?” she called softly. “Anakin, this could be trouble.”
“I’ve got the skips, Uncle Luke,” she heard.
One X-wing altered course. Even from this distance, she sensed something flowing strong through the Force, as Anakin—without hesitating—reached down deep, with the utter calm of a warrior twice his age. His X-wing bucked and spun, firing constantly. He took two skips before the other two realigned their molten-projectile guns.
From another vector, Luke’s X-wing dropped toward the gunship. She spotted the flare of a dual torp launch. The instant she knew the gunship couldn’t swing its energy gullet into place and devour them, she broke off her attack, vectored high, and directed full power to her aft shields.
“Got ’im,” Luke crowed. Then, more soberly, he called, “Cargo hauler, is that your maximum acceleration?”
She didn’t recognize the voice that answered, but she knew awe when she heard it. “Skywalker? That’s you, in the X-wing?”
“Right on you. Pour it on, hauler.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mara’s sensors showed an infinitesimal acceleration, probably all the battered hauler could manage.
Not far off this vector, a similar hauler plunged back toward Duro’s cloud cover, tumbling slowly. Bburru, too, was grappled in six places by objects that might be living ships, its shipyard arm already a web of twisted metal.
Another city, the one that had been rammed,