Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [108]
Coralskippers with enough fight left in them began peppering the X- and B-wings with plasma nodules and marshaling their dovin basals to make grabs for the attackers’ particle shields.
Then, without warning, capital ships at the heart of the armada funneled furious firestorms along the depleted lanes. Jaina’s X-wing wobbled and tumbled through a swirling corridor of flames. With the starfighter’s shields all but incinerated, she rammed the control stick to one side to free herself, rolling out of volcanic heat with the ship nearly roasted, and Cappie’s dome a drooping hood of molten alloy. She performed a desperate pushover and scanned local space, dismayed to discover that almost all of the TIE defenders were gone—atomized by the superheated tempest.
The beast hadn’t been stunned by the initial assaults; it had merely been waiting for the right time to counterpunch. And the single blow it delivered had knocked fifty or more starfighters out of the fight.
Jaina was doing a count of Twin Suns when the armada yammosks instructed the tentacle arms to rotate clockwise, and full chains of coralskippers and pickets quickly filled the gaps.
Where moments earlier Jaina was facing six wounded skips, she suddenly found herself in the sights of a ravenous thirty.
TWENTY-THREE
A similar thing had happened to Jacen on Duro, three years back.
At the time, he had been helping a group of Ryn refugees fit a synthplas dome over the prefabricated building that was to be their shelter. This time he was off on his own in the Middle Distance, picking his way downhill to a still pool on the floor of a narrow valley.
Jaina?
On Duro, he had passed out and fallen, knocking himself unconscious. This time a forest creeper swept his feet out from under him, and he pitched forward, sliding face-first on muddy ground and sodden deflated leaves until he managed to somersault himself onto his back and extend his hands to the sides. He was still meters from the valley floor when he arrested his descent, but his lightsaber fell prey to momentum and soared free of the cloth belt that cinched his robe. Tumbling end over end through the air, it arced into the depths of the ice-fringed pool below.
Jacen leapt to his feet and vaulted to the water’s edge. Focusing on the center of the concentric waves that were spreading across the pool, he immersed himself in the Force and stretched out his right hand.
The tubular alloy handgrip emerged vertically from the water, but not alone.
It was held in the upraised four-fingered hand of Vergere.
Sekot’s thought projection of the diminutive Fosh, at any rate, looking much younger than the piebald, short-feathered Vergere Jacen had come to know on Coruscant. Her willowy ears and pair of corkscrewing antennae appeared smaller, and her slanted eyes were radiant with wonder. The splayed feet of her reverse-articulated legs rested just on the surface of the agitated pool.
“Lose something, Jacen?” Sekot asked through Vergere’s wide mouth.
“Not for the first time.” His exhalations formed clouds in the chill air.
“It’s not like you to stumble.”
“My sister Jaina is in danger. I forgot to look where I was going.”
“How often will you allow yourself to be distracted by the dangers she faces?”
This was Vergere as remembered by Sekot, Jacen thought, in contrast to the Vergere who had sacrificed her life at Ebaq 9 to save him and Jaina. “As often as necessary,” he said. “We’re twins, and strongly bonded.”
“What if you were faced with the choice of saving your twin or your uncle? Which do you serve?”