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“On our way, Colonel,” Shawnkyr responded.

At Borleias, she had urged Jag to return to their native Chiss space. Now she was as much an Alliance pilot as he was.

Dodging projectiles, Jag banked over the forest. He was doubling back to the transport when he finally caught sight of its sister ship, ten kilometers to the south and covered stem to stern in grutchins.

The Yellow Aces were pursuing the out-of-control vessel and using their lasers to dislodge the grutchins, as if picking vermin off a pet. But the acid-producing, globular-eyed insectoids had ingested large areas of the hull and, judging by the way the transport was wobbling, had already infiltrated the cabin spaces. Jag watched helplessly as the vessel bellied into the forest, cutting a wide, burning swath through the trees. Sliding for a kilometer or more, it tipped nose-first over the rim of a deep crevasse and began a slow descent toward the bottom.

Closer to the lasered clearing, Rogue and Twin Suns snub-fighters were making paired strafing runs over the rakamat and Yuuzhan Vong infantry units, creating an inferno with lasers and proton torpedoes.

Slowed by its repulsorlift engines, number one transport was a few kilometers short of the laser-denuded tableland when a large hatch opened in its ventral surface. First to exit the hatch were YVH droids, folded into foam-filled crash canisters. Then, sheathed in enviro-suits and harnessed into jet packs, came Page’s company, soaring from the rectangular opening and spiraling down to the surface. The pilots of Wraith Squadron followed, setting their X-wings down and scrambling from the cockpits.

Jag swung wide to make another pass over the forest.

With projectiles streaking out of the trees, Gavin Darklighter’s Rogues buzzed like angry hornets, torching everything that moved. Jag was racing to join them when a fireball caught the clawcraft from behind, blowing away pieces of the starboard solar panels and sending him into an uncontrollable spin.

The crowns of the trees rushed up at him, then patches of soggy ground. The clawcraft whined as it slammed into the canopy, and darkness engulfed him.

The view forward from the plush cockpit of Lady Luck revealed a panorama of stroboscopic globular explosions stretched across, as well as two or three degrees above and below, the ecliptic plane.

“That was the Alliance’s salvo,” Lando told Tendra.

Her mouth was slightly ajar, she was shaking her head in amazement. “I’ve never seen anything that was at once so beautiful and so dreadful.” Tall, even for a Sacorrian, Tendra was a regal beauty, with sparkling brown eyes and full lips.

The SoroSuub luxury yacht, a somewhat flattened and oblate vessel, was well inside the Alliance lines, but close enough for long-range scanners to capture the continuous exchanges of fire, if not detail the individual warships themselves. Lando knew that Wedge was out there somewhere, along with countless other friends and comrades he had known from as far back as the Battle of Endor.

He couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so small or alone. In a gesture that combined affection and anguish, he tightened his grip on Tendra’s hand.

No sooner had the spherical explosions faded than a pyrotechnic display of what might have been fire-tailed comets rocketed from unseen sources, splaying against deflector screens too distant to discern, and in some cases creating explosions of their own.

“Nas Choka’s response,” Lando said dryly.

He flipped a switch on the communications console and swiveled his chair slightly toward the cockpit’s audio pickups. “You watching this?”

“Can’t take my eyes away,” Talon Karrde answered from Wild Karrde, five hundred kilometers Rimward and, like Lady Luck, running mostly silent.

Scores of other starfighters, converted yachts, and blockade runners allied with the loosely knit Smugglers’ Alliance were deployed between Wild Karrde and Errant Venture, which was closest to Zonama Sekot, and thus almost a quarter of the way to the outer-system world of Stentat.

“How long are we