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Jaina ignored the displays of her range finder and computer-aided sights and relied on the Force to guide her to targets of opportunity. The battle channels were noisy with chatter.

“We can’t clear a path for the transport with those skips hugging the carriers,” Harona was admonishing Scimitar Squadron. “Three Flight, you’ve got to take out that dorsal plasma launcher. Two Flight, see if you can draw those skips away.”

“We’re trying, Scimitar Leader, but they won’t take the bait.”

“Copy that. Then we’ll just have to take the fight to them.”

Jaina saw that the same situation applied to the tethered carrier. The coralskippers were intent on protecting the vessel at all costs—or at least until it could detach from the Peace Brigade freighter. Close in, Twin Suns’ Two Flight salvoed, opening rends in the yorik coral ridges that shielded the vessel’s drive dovin basal.

Jaina had the rest of her squadron tighten up their ragged formation and press the attack. When the X-wings began to score hits, the coralskippers reacted by dispersing. With patent disdain for evasionary tactics, the lead skip launched itself at Jaina. Then the entire swarm sallied forth from their protective positions.

“Twin One, single skip at your right wing,” Alema warned.

“Thanks, Nine.”

Jaina wheeled away from a flurry of missiles, rolled, and came about. She and the opposing flight leader squared off and bored in on each other, their respective wingmates falling back, too busy holding position and adapting to their leaders’ actions to do any firing. The skip opened a void directly in front of Jaina, but she managed to twist free in the nick of time. The X-wing bucked, then righted itself. Jaina thumbed the trigger of the lasers, pouring fire into the gravitic hole. The dovin basal rushed to absorb the energy, leaving the coralskipper momentarily unprotected. It was all the time Jaina needed. The X-wing’s starboard lasers hammered the skip mercilessly, splitting it down the middle. Long plumes of incandescence streamed from the rend; then the skip vanished in blinding light.

Two and Three Flights were meeting with similar success. All discipline forgotten, the coralskippers were streaking away from the carrier in a flurry of maneuvers, even while crisscrossing lines of destruction probed for them.

Off toward what was the head of the convoy, the first carrier had gone belly-up; off to both sides, Kyp’s Dozen and Blackmoon were flying circles around three Peace Brigade ships whose laser cannon turrets were smoking ruins. And now Alliance gunships and transports were on their way into the arena, keen on filling themselves to bursting with liberated captives.

Jaina ordered One and Three Flights to surround the umbilicaled carrier. She asked Lowbacca to drop Two Flight back to field any skips that might attempt to break through the line.

Kyp commed her. “Just learned that Alliance agents have sabotaged the hyperdrives on all but one of the freighters. They’re ours now.”

“That’s great news,” Jaina said.

“Here’s an even better piece. Your parents are here.”

Jaina smiled. “I felt them.”

Her eyes followed a blip on the display screen that could only be the Millennium Falcon. It was headed her way.

She hadn’t seen her parents in weeks, and had learned only the previous day that they had not only been responsible for providing intelligence on the convoy, but also volunteered for the rescue mission.

Not that that surprised her in the least.

She sent a greeting through the Force. Her mother would know who it was from.

It wasn’t long before she could see the Falcon with her own eyes. Her parents were maneuvering the ship as deftly as if she were an X- or Y-wing, top and belly quad lasers dispatching coralskippers unlucky enough to be in the way. A sleek Alliance picket, bristling with weapons, flew in the Falcon’s wake. As the two ships closed on the number two carrier, the picket fired a harpoon directly into the nose of the Peace Brigade freighter at the