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Bril’nilim pointed over toward the southeast. “You, I’d like there, your nephews off to the southwest. Let me know anything you feel that is odd, and I can send scouts out.”

“As ordered, Colonel.” Luke turned and found his nephews hanging back a bit. “Did you hear?”

Jacen nodded. “Yes. Anakin and I go over there, you’re over here. We report whatever is odd.”

“Right. No going yourselves to investigate, understand?”

Colonel Bril’nilim’s lekku twitched as he came around. “You better understand. No heroics. My troops will shoot things they don’t understand, and a Jedi sneaking around will be one of them. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the two young Jedi Knights said in unison.

Luke and the colonel exchanged smiles. “Good, get to it. I like having three Jedi on my line. I just hope none of us will have to see too much action.”

“Tough Seven here. I could use some cover on my attack run.”

Jaina clicked on her comm unit. “Rogue Eleven on you, T-sev.”

“Thanks, Sticks.”

The Jedi pilot rolled her X-wing up on the port stabilizer and came around on a heading that put her to starboard of the X-ceptor heading in at the ground formation. The TIE interceptor wings on the X-ceptor spat laser darts past its long X-wing nose, scything down rows of Yuuzhan Vong troopers. Though Jaina could not see much in the green light from the lasers, she could make out that none of the Yuuzhan Vong troopers broke or ran. They also seem small to me, stockier than I thought the Yuuzhan Vong were from what Jacen described.

A coralskipper came around and vectored in on the X-ceptor. Jaina shoved her stick forward and sprayed red laser splinters at the skip. It immediately sprouted a void that sucked in most of the laserfire. Jaina kept her ship coming on hard and loosed a solid quad burst in the midst of a spray, which caused the Yuuzhan Vong pilot to shy off. As he broke to her port, she rolled to port and leveled out in T-sev’s aft. I don’t like being shielding, but I need to give him this shot.

Fire blossomed from the X-ceptor’s nose as a proton torpedo squirted out. Jaina bounced her ship up after the launch and gained a bit of altitude. Below her the torpedo streaked straight at the first moving mountain shadow, then it exploded into a brilliant silvery ball that lit up the night.

The X-wing’s canopy flash suppressor engaged immediately, cutting out most of the glare but still allowing her to see what was going on at the point of the attack. The torpedo had detonated shy of the target by about one hundred meters, and a void had gobbled up a lot of the energy, but what little it didn’t consume wrought havoc on the ground. The energy evaporated soldiers, eliminating whole companies in the blink of an eye. Others it scattered like toys beneath a vengeful child’s feet. The shock wave toppled several of the smaller vehicles, which looked to Jaina like bony armored domes mounted on brush-bristle cilia. Several rolled onto their backs, with their little legs waving in the air, while others that had their cilia flash-fried ground to a halt.

Most impressive, however, had been the larger vehicle at which T-sev had aimed. Like the smaller creatures, it had a bony-plate armor. Along its spine, and at points on the flanks, hornlike growths jutted out. Plasma bolts shot from these horns, and while she couldn’t tell if the horns could swivel, enough of them pointed in any one direction to be able to scour the skies of fighters.

She shuddered, as the whole thing looked to her like one giant, armored slug sprouting thorns.

Jaina rolled hard to starboard, then sideslipped back to port before triggering a burst at the thing, which she arbitrarily decided to call a range—short for mountain range. A void snapped her shots up, and the range launched plasma in her direction. She juked her way clear of most shots and heard the static of her shields absorbing damage from the others. Her sensors reported other gravitic anomalies, which she assumed were dovin basals trying to take