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The Yuuzhan Vong warship just kept growing bigger and bigger as the X-wings sped toward it. The big ship’s aft end came up, allowing it to point its dorsal spines forward, along its line of travel. Golden light blossomed at their tips, then boiling gold balls of plasma shot out, arcing out toward the ships in the convoy.

The shots, taken at ranges of over five kilometers, were not terribly accurate for hitting small freighters. Even so, each of the ships in the convoy had a set flight path if it was going to escape the system. With the Yuuzhan Vong fire cutting across that flight path, a collision was inevitable.

The first freighter hit was one that reminded Jaina very much of the Millennium Falcon. The plasma blast caught it on the starboard side, burning clean through the cockpit and eating a crescent deep into it. The ship started tumbling like a chip in a sabacc game, with people and debris spilling out of it. It whirled away toward the brown bulk of Destrillion, destined to burn up in that bleak world’s atmosphere.

Jaina watched it die, and she suddenly felt cold—not physically, but emotionally. People who were fleeing, people who had not asked for their world to be attacked, had just been murdered, and more would be murdered along with them if she did nothing. Without conscious thought, just feeling her way through the maneuvers, she inverted her X-wing and dived in toward the Yuuzhan Vong ship. She rolled the fighter up on its port stabilizers, then leveled out and cruised along the ship’s hull.

She kept a light hand on the stick, juking left and right, bouncing up and down as she went. The coralskippers mounted in the spines shot small plasma bolts at her in golden streams, but her maneuvering kept her free of their fire. More importantly, she noted, the rough patches on the ship had dovin basals that were projecting black holes to absorb stutter shots from her lasers, and those voids also warped the plasma trajectories.

As her ship streaked over the warship’s surface she started firing through plasma streams, letting her bolts cross the plasma paths the way the plasma was cutting the flight path for the convoy. The dovin basals were forced to project voids into those streams to pick off her shots. They absorbed laser bolts as well as plasma shots. This not only tired the dovin basals, but put them in the odd position of providing cover for Jaina’s fighter.

Hauling back on the stick, she came up and made a run at one of the spines. Assuming that whatever mechanism the ship used to direct the plasma bolts was located in the tip, she clipped off a few shots at one. Dovin basals around the tip absorbed all the shots save one. That single shot burned past the tip a second before a plasma bolt raced out at the convoy.

Makes sense. The dovin basals shield the tip until just before a shot comes out. Jaina keyed her comm unit. “Lead, the tips are vulnerable. We have a window before they shoot. I’m taking one out.”

“Careful, Sticks.”

“As anyone, Lead.”

Jaina felt a curious peace settle over her as she brought her X-wing up and around in a spiral that rose along one of the spines. Golden plasma bolts flashed up past her. A couple nicked her shields, but she reinforced the power there very quickly. At the tip of the shaft the bolts curved in toward the gravity wells the dovin basals were creating. She shot past that area, then hit hard port rudder and reversed her ship’s thrust. The X-wing swapped itself end for end, then, when she cut her throttle to zero, the fighter hovered there in space, five hundred meters from the end of the shaft.

Jaina looked right down into it. The spine’s tip had a triskele valve at the tip. It reminded her of heart valves. It would open up for a second or two, just long enough to eject the plasma, then close again, sealing up the firing tube. It had an elegance about it, yet seemed so primitive when compared to the fighter in which she sat.

She triggered the flicker shots and poured a steady rain of energy