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The droid did as commanded, and the shiver that had gone through the X-wing quit. Gavin smiled broadly. To avoid the wear and tear of gravity and inertia on the pilots and fighters, each X-wing came with an inertial compensator built in. It allowed the X-wings to perform very high-speed, high-inertial maneuvers without structural damage to the ship and physical damage to the pilot. By expanding the area covered by this field to thirteen meters—putting it out beyond the shields—the compensator treated the Yuuzhan Vong gravity beams like anything else stressing the fighter.

If enough ships locked onto the fighter, they would eventually demand more energy output than its engines could manage, causing the field to implode and the ship to be ripped apart. Gavin goosed the throttle forward and broke to port, pulling away from the coralskipper that had tried to lock onto him. Suddenly a bright light flashed and the coralskipper disappeared from his rear screen.

“Who got it?”

Nevil answered. “Locking onto you and having you slip away must have tired it or confused it. I dropped a proton torpedo in. Coralduster.”

“Good, on me.” Gavin brought his X-wing around and back up to the main body of the dogfight. A glance at his secondary monitor showed two Rogues failing to respond on the comm frequency. A flash of orange confirmed at least one pilot was outside his ship. Elsewhere he saw a coralskipper tight on an X-wing’s tail, lacing the shrinking aft shield with plasma blasts.

“Snoop, report.”

“Good here, Lead. I’m clear. Got it all, including the one that took Eleven and Twelve.”

“Which one?”

A pulse of data from the T-65R brought a specific coralskipper up on his targeting monitor. It didn’t look that different from the others, but as he flew toward it, he could tell by the way it moved and maneuvered, it had a hot hand on the stick.

“With me, Deuce?”

A double click coming back through the comm channel confirmed Nevil’s understanding of his role. Gavin came up on the port S-foil and pulled back on the stick to run his X-wing in at the killer coralskipper. He plotted a course that would pass behind it and kept adjusting it to tighten the distance between them without arrowing straight in at it.

The coralskipper was intent on tracking one of the X-wings. Gavin identified the ship as belonging to Lieutenant Ligg Panat, a Krish female who had just joined the squadron. The Krish were well known for their love of games, and the way she was flying made Gavin think she was taking the Yuuzhan Vong on her tail a bit too lightly. She was managing to juke her ship around, making it hard to hit, but she still couldn’t break away cleanly.

“Seven, this is Lead. On my mark, reverse throttle, break port.”

“Lead, I can handle—”

“This is an order, Seven. On my mark. Mark.”

Ligg reversed her thrust and rolled to the left, making it look as if she’d just nudged her ship out of the Yuuzhan Vong pilot’s way. The coralskipper shot past her, then rolled out right and came up. The Yuuzhan Vong ship’s nose came around, and the coralskipper lined up for a head-to-head run on Gavin’s fighter.

That sent a jolt through Gavin. Why would it do that? If it uses its black holes to shield itself, it can’t take down my shields, so its plasma shots won’t get through. If it takes down my shields, I can dump a torp down its throat. Makes no sense.

Realizing that if he couldn’t tell what the enemy was planning, going along with the enemy’s plan was stupid, Gavin triggered a burst of flickers at the incoming target. The cloud of red energy needles flew out and, as he expected, curved in together into the black hole the coralskipper had erected to protect itself. What he hadn’t expected is that the void would intercept them that far forward.

Gavin kicked his fighter into a snap roll to starboard, then jammed the throttle full. Sparks shot from the inertial compensator panel as the X-wing grazed the edge of the black hole. Catch screamed, and Gavin hugged