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The next wave of skips hit them and hit them hard, fighting with a sort of desperation that Jaina hadn’t yet seen in the Yuuzhan Vong. They came in clusters, three flying as shields for a fourth. Jaina needled them at long range with her lasers, determined not to waste another proton torpedo if she didn’t have to.

“I don’t like this,” Wedge said. “They aren’t maneuvering. They’re just coming head-on.”

“Makes them easy pickings,” Lensi said. From the corner of her eye, Jaina saw one of his targets flare out.

“Too easy, Twelve,” Wedge said.

One of Jaina’s targets tumbled out of formation, its cockpit a fused mass of coral.

“Two-flight, break!” Wedge suddenly shouted. Even as he did so, the cover skips broke, and their undamaged charges accelerated through the gap. They weren’t firing weapons, and they weren’t throwing out voids.

Jaina jerked her stick up, and the skip rose to meet her.

“I’m going to hit!” Seven screamed, before his channel went dead.

The voids slowed the skips down. When they weren’t using them, they were incredibly maneuverable. Jaina’s climb was as tight as she could get it, but the skip was matching her, still coming on, still at the bottom of her field of vision, clearly determined to ram her. Meanwhile, the remaining two skips that had flown shield for it were trying to pick up her tail. She had nowhere to go, and if she brought her weapons in line to fire, she’d meet her enemy head-on, as Seven had just presumably done.

Suddenly a quad burst of lasers from above her imaginary horizon cut the skip in half. Jaina didn’t have time to see who her rescuer was. She jammed the stick down and starboard, skimming by the wreckage of the coralskipper and shaking the two behind her.

Except the two behind her were already gone.

“You’re clean, Jaina,” Kyp’s voice informed her. “General Antilles, permission to fly what’s left of my Dozen with you.”

“Granted, Durron. I’ll take what I can get, now.”

The Ralroost and its escorts had taken a lot of hits in the first wave of suicides, but once the tactic was understood, the remaining starfighters fanned out and picked off the determined skips far in advance. The Yuuzhan Vong that made it through their runs intact ended up behind them, where collision was much less effective. They still had their weapons, of course, and it made Jaina more than a little nervous to have so many live enemies at her back, but target prime was just ahead, and she had a job to do.

The Ralroost opened up on the galaxy-shaped ship. Red streamers of plasma lanced out from the curved tips of the Yuuzhan Vong weapon, but the destroyer’s shields handled the fire easily.

“I don’t get it,” Jaina said. “Why use conventional weapons? Why aren’t they using the gravity weapon?”

“It’s our lucky day,” Kyp said. “It must be off-line.”

Multiple proton concussions blossomed at the axis of the Yuuzhan Vong weapon, rendering it a dull-red glowing mass.

“Jaina, behind you!”

Kyp’s warning came too late. Twin bursts of plasma sheared through her shields and into her ion engines. A quick babble from her astromech told her that if she didn’t shut down in fifteen seconds, the whole mess was going supercritical. She’d lost a stabilizer, too, and the ship was spinning crazily.

And she still had a tail. Kyp got one of them, but the other just kept coming.

This is it.

The Yuuzhan Vong superweapon filled most of her gyrating vision, now. Grimly, she did her best to aim for it, then shut down. Maybe she could skip off it with repulsors. If not, at least she would put another ding in the thing.

But then something in the huge craft made a very big bang, and all she saw was inferno.

“Corran’s been gone a long time,” Tahiri whispered.

“Not so long,” Anakin replied. “Only about five minutes.”

“Seems longer.” He felt her shiver, probably from the biting cold. In fact, the only part of Anakin that wasn’t freezing was the strip along his side where he was pressed against the younger Jedi.

“There has to be something we can do,” she said. “If we