• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“So do I,” she retorted, a little stung by the glacial tone that had entered Jag’s voice. His response didn’t exactly come as a surprise, though. Pilots were renowned for their pride, and she’d just stomped on the edges of his. Still, if Jag was determined to fly with Kyp, someone ought to tell him he’d set course on a dangerous vector.

“Suit yourself. But while you’re watching my back, keep an eye on your own.”

She firmly clicked off the comm and concentrated on flying the ship. The Trickster rebelled against its mechanical hitchhiker, and Jaina waged a silent but fierce argument with the ship in an effort to keep it from shedding the pirate vessel. Finally the sentient frigate yielded to a compromise.

“Lowbacca, Ganner, can you put that panel back in place?”

“You’re not thinking about abandoning them?” Alema Rar demanded.

“The ship wants to,” she replied, “but it’ll settle for a chance to heal itself. It’s a good precaution.”

Lowbacca waved Ganner aside, then wrapped his long arms around the coral oval and heaved. He set it down in front of the portal with a resounding thud and then shouldered it into place. Immediately a dark goo began to seep from the surrounding wall, filling in the crack and binding the portal back into the wall.

Jaina clicked on the comm. “Zekk, if you can lock down the breached chamber, do it. Just in case.”

“Already done.”

She turned her attention to the task of flying the ship—and keeping a mental connection open to her fellow pilot. Talking was useless, for there were no words to equate one technology with the other. The two pilots communicated through feelings, impressions, adjusting their speed and direction to match each other precisely. Jaina had jokingly described their shared flight as a dance, and that’s precisely what it felt like—a dance between enormous, mismatched partners.

All went well until they entered Hapes’s atmosphere. The Trickster shuddered as the dovin basal adjusted for the planet’s gravity. A loud, groaning creak announced that the heat and turbulence of reentry was straining the seal between the ships. The messages coming to Jaina through the cognition hood were garbled, as if the ship were confused.

Suddenly Jaina was none too happy about their chances. She tossed a look over her shoulder. Tahiri was right behind her, a place she seemed to be taking with increasing frequency. “Tahiri, you’ve flown in these things before. How did you land?”

“We crashed, mostly,” the girl admitted.

The ship shook and pitched as it neared the ground. “It’s panicking,” Jaina realized. “It thinks the attached ship is pulling it down.”

“Let me try,” Tahiri offered, prodding Lowbacca out of the navigation chair. She pulled on the hood. After a moment she shook her head. “No good. It’s not listening anymore.”

“You hear that, Zekk?” she called through the comm.

“Cut us loose,” he said tersely.

Jaina relayed her intention to the ship and then wrenched the frigate to one side. The seal released at once, and the Trickster soared away from the pirate ship.

Her heart crawled into her throat as she watched the damaged ship spiral slowly toward the ground. It was scant meters from crashing before Zekk finally managed to pull out of the spin. He brought the ship into a rising turn, then slowed to a hover as the repulsor engines came on. The cargo ship lowered onto the landing dock, coming to rest heavily but safely.

To Jaina’s relief, the Trickster calmed and followed its erstwhile partner down to the dock. As soon as the Yuuzhan Vong frigate set down, she suggested that it rest and then yanked off the hood.

The other Jedi had left the ship by the time she finished shutting down. When she reached the open hatch, she noted them standing together in a tight knot. Several Hapan military officials supervised the removal of the fighter ships from the cargo hold of the captured vessel; others led the pirates away.

Jaina hurried down the ramp, and her eyes sought out Zekk. “You didn’t have a choice,” he said before she could