Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [195]
In contrast, Warmaster Nas Choka seemed to be concentrating the armada’s swiftest vessels at Zonama Sekot, as if the planet was somehow the key to winning the war. The fear among the Jedi pilots of the Sekotan fighters was that the Yuuzhan Vong knew something about Alpha Red that the Alliance didn’t. Perhaps winged-stars and flitnats weren’t the only life-forms that were susceptible to the bioengineered toxin, and all of Zonama Sekot was at risk.
Word that an enemy vessel contaminated with Alpha Red had been spotted flying with the original task force had placed the Jedi on the offensive. Although Jabitha had been unable to contact Sekot since, the planet showed signs of having grasped the enormity of the unforeseen threat. Columns of fiery devastation half a kilometer wide were streaming upward from summits of skyscraping mountains, boiling through layers of gauzy ice clouds to vaporize attacking coralskippers and picket vessels. Scores had already fallen to Zonama’s wrath, and scores more stood at the threshold of annihilation.
Defending close to the surface, Kyp would no sooner conclude one duel than another would present itself. Now that he and his ship had finally gotten to know each other, the fighter was responding to his every whim. But the Jedi fighters were only a dozen against hundreds, and skips were breaking through the Hapan cordon to assail the planetary weapons emplacements or make strafing runs through the deep canyons of the Middle Distance, where most of the Ferroans were holed up in the shelters. No less overwhelmed, Corran, Saba, Alema, and the others were streaking in and out of contests, their ships darting above the boras like soldier hornets protecting a nest. As had so often happened in previous battles, the Yuuzhan Vong were slowly gaining the upper hand through sheer determination and the strength of numbers. Whether the unrelenting assault echoed the will of the individual pilots or the resoluteness of the controlling yammosk, the invaders were finding soft spots and creating openings, to assure that the Alpha Red-poisoned craft would reach the surface intact.
Kyp was drawing on his ship’s extraordinary speed to intercept a pair of coralskippers when a sudden coolness enveloped his right hand—the hand that the control console had engulfed, and was in fact his interface with the ship. Almost instantly the fighter began to shed velocity and grow unresponsive. Kyp pressed the control stick trigger. Though the launchers were far from depleted, they refused to fire. Sensing that something had changed, the skip pilots began to harry him with plasma fire. With maneuverability lost, only the organic shields were keeping the ship from being destroyed.
Kyp’s first instinct was to blame himself. His ego had crept back into the fight, and he had lost his rapport with the ship as a result. Or maybe he had been doing too much thinking. The frequent updates from Lando, the comm chatter with Corran and the other Jedi, the upsurge in the savagery of the fighting since word of the poisoned ship had been received …
Then Kyp realized that it wasn’t only his ship that had powered down.
Throughout the fire-fractured sky other Sekotan ships were abbreviating their duels. The comlink grew noisy with reports from Corran, Zekk, Lowbacca, and Saba, confirming that their fighters, too, were no longer responding.
Chased by the same pair of coralskippers, Kyp swooped through evasive turns that took him over a sawtoothed mountain range just south of the Middle Distance, which had been responsible for some of the heaviest outpourings of defensive fire. Now, though, even some of those summit weapons were beginning to fall silent. Above Kyp, flights of emboldened skips were plunging deeper into the gravity well.
“The craft Lando reported seeing at Caluula could have been a decoy,” Corran said to Kyp over the comlink. “The