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“We’re not trying to win the battle, Wedge, just trying to win some time.” Kre’fey pointed toward his station on the bridge. “Sensors, give me a holographic feed of the system, and start relaying all our tactical data out to Coruscant through the drone we left at the edge of the system.”

“Setting it up now, Admiral.”

“Good, very good.” He let a predatory grin slowly spread over his face. A low growl rumbled from his throat, summoning up a very fundamental piece of his Bothan psyche. It was something he set aside when dealing with humans, for they so often saw the malevolent side of it in Bothan politics. We are predators by nature, and now I need that nature.

“Remain here with me, Wedge Antilles.” Kre’fey’s words rolled out in low tones, born deep in his chest. “We might not be able to kill the Yuuzhan Vong here, but we can hurt them, and that might just be enough.”

Jaina kicked her X-wing up into a portside barrel roll, then came around for a long glide to starboard. She stayed hot on Anni’s port wing, the two of them angling in for a series of deflection shots on a skip squadron. “Ready when you are, Twelve.”

Anni double-clicked her comm, acknowledging Jaina’s comment. The pair of them adjusted their course, drifting a little more starboard, then closed on a knot of six skips jetting in at the Best Chance. In a flash of blue fire, a proton torpedo launched from Anni’s X-wing. A heartbeat later a second missile raced from the starfighter.

Jaina’s eyes narrowed. If this works . . .

The first proton torpedo approached the group of skips, and the Yuuzhan Vong fighters responded by putting up voids to catch the missile before it could hit the fighters. Using a tactic that had proved effective in the fighting on Dantooine, the New Republic had programmed the proton torpedo to detonate prematurely when it detected a gravitic anomaly, which this missile did.

The skips then found themselves on a course heading straight for a titanic cloud of energy. This shattered the formation. The Yuuzhan Vong pilots broke like birds in flight, twisting their ships about at acute angles. Some flew below, and others turned toward the attack. One pair broke away and up, and therein proved the efficacy of the new tactic.

The one flaw in the coralskipper design was that the dovin basals that manipulated gravity waves to provide propulsion also were the things that generated the voids. The New Republic analysts had noted that when voids were generated, the ability of skips to maneuver was diminished. It took Rogue Squadron’s pilots to realize that the reverse might also be true.

The second proton torpedo caught up with two of the fleeing skips and exploded. One skip vanished amid the brilliant detonation. The other caught a part of the blast on its port side, melting the yorik coral and exposing the cockpit to vacuum. The stony ship stopped flying with any direction or purpose and just tumbled toward Garqi like so much other interstellar debris.

Jaina dropped her aiming reticle on the closest Yuuzhan Vong fighter and hit the splinter-shot trigger. Her quadded lasers spat out hundreds of underpowered laser darts at her target. A small void absorbed some of them, but quickly collapsed, allowing other shots to pepper the fighter’s rocky exterior. The second she saw splinters getting through, she hit the main trigger, loosing a full quad burst on the fighter.

The sizzling crimson bolts converged on the skip, filling the nose with enough energy to make it glow white-hot. Molten stone peeled back, sloughing off like dead flesh. The skip began a slow roll, then shook and jerked, thrashing as the dovin basals died.

Anni clipped off a quick shot that damaged the other skip but didn’t kill it, and then she and Jaina were through to the other side of the Yuuzhan Vong formation. Watching the sensors intently, Jaina brought her X-wing around for another run. Above her the battle had deteriorated, with skips and X-wings spinning and looping, streaking and rolling in a chaotic tangle. The proton torpedo tactic that proved so useful in the first