• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Nice work!” Han said. “Now see if you can get rid of the other two!”

Again the reciprocating guns began to clack, loosing bright green salvos of devastating energy at the Falcon’s pursuers. Voids formed instantly at the blunt noses of the wedge-shaped skips, and most of the quad bursts were swallowed, but some of Luke’s bolts got through, and hunks of yorik coral flew off into space. Abruptly the lead skip peeled away and tried to attach itself to the Falcon in what would have been the kill zone of an ordinary ship.

Han merely applied power, rolled, and dived for the surface.

Plasma projectiles streamed from the frustrated skip, but all it received for the effort were answering barrages of laserfire. Struck repeatedly, the coralskipper wobbled as pieces of its wide stern were blown away. Crippled, the skip went into a helpless wiggle, then commenced a long fall toward the planet, trailing a plume of smoke and yorik coral dust.

The surviving skip held position through the Falcon’s corkscrewing dive and continued firing. As plasma ranged closer, Han boosted power to the rear shields and narrowed the ship’s profile by pulling a snap-roll that lifted the Falcon onto her starboard side. Luke and Leia triggered out-of-phase bursts, which began to wear down the dovin basal and penetrate the small voids it was managing to produce. Sustaining convergent strikes to the bow, the skip reared up and split apart.

The Falcon flashed out of her evasive maneuvers, then banked broadly and darted for clear space. Raising the bow, Han leveled out and arced for the horizon.

“Let Luke know I’m deactivating the artificial gravity,” he told Jaina. “If he knows what’s good for him he’ll climb out of that belly turret.”

Shortly, the Falcon was wending through forested spires that rose east of the sacred precinct. Below were villip paddies, interconnected orange-tinted lakes, and yorik coral quarries—some containing skips in their formative stages. Flames mushroomed and stabbed from the deep canyons, and microstorms carried burning vegetation toward distant patches of woodland.

“We’ve been spotted,” Jaina said. “Coralskippers approaching from the south.”

Han punched the throttle, whipping the freighter up and over a burning mound, then dropped down over the expansive plain from which Imperial/New Republic City had grown. He had to keep reminding himself that he wasn’t flying over hills but over buried structures; that what appeared to be an escarpment had been a kilometers-long block of residential buildings; that the geometric craters dotting the landscape were the foundations of the great edifices themselves, now filled with cobalt-blue water or lush forest.

“Better switch us over to the tactical frequency,” he said.

No sooner had Jaina reset the dials on the comm board than a tone sounded.

“Homing beacon,” she told Han. A map of the Yuuzhan Vong-formed governmental district resolved on the terrain-following sensor screen. Jaina tapped her forefinger against a pulsing bezel. “That’s our rally point.”

What should have come into view was Mount Umate, highest peak of the Manarai Mountains. But what came into view instead was a massive crater encompassing all of what had once been Monument Plaza. Perched on the protruding permacrete shoulders of the ruined arena were flocks of winged creatures similar to the seabirdlike fliers Han and Leia had seen at Selvaris. At the base of the ancient uplift, not far from where the Kallarak Amphitheater should have been, was another immense crater, whose thickly forested floor was in flames. On the steep slopes, herds of six-legged beasts and packs of panicked lizard hounds were trying desperately to scrabble to safety.

The smoke was denser at the outskirts of the sacred precinct.

Eastport, where the Solos had lived and Han had kept the Falcon docked, was a memory. Dirigiblelike, flame-spewing monstrosities wobbled and bobbed through the ruins of Sky-dome Botanical Gardens, Column Commons, and Calocour Heights. Wherever Han looked he saw evidence of the incredible damage wrought by