Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [117]
She shook her head. The Yuuzhan Vong force marching toward the facility was too great; the defenders could not hold the site.
Until now, she’d been silently raging at Wedge Antilles. Whenever she’d manage to make inroads against the enemy assault, he or one of his controllers would order her to withdraw a half kilometer, a hundred meters. It was as if they didn’t want her to win. But now she could see that too much success on her part would serve only to cut Twin Suns off from the other units, to doom her and her pilots. It was probably best that she’d been ordered to fall back at the same rate as the other squadrons.
The mind of Jaina the Goddess woke up. Jaina frowned. Fall back at the same rate. She consulted her sensor board. That was exactly what was happening. The New Republic Forces had withdrawn where they were too strong, and been reinforced where they were too weak, and now every live unit of those forces was within a kilometer of the kill zone.
“Jag, I need to apologize to your uncle,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you why later.”
“All units, fall back to kill zone,” Iella said. “All units, fall back to kill zone. You have fifteen seconds. Fourteen. Thirteen.”
Jaina led her squad back, taking up position directly over the landing zone in front of the biotics building, directing their lasers back the way they’d come. “Twin Suns Squadron, on-station.” Using her repulsorlifts, she drifted to port and a stream of plasma whipped past her, splashing onto the blue transparisteel panels on the face of the building; she directed laserfire back at her attacker.
Other unit commanders called in readiness as the countdown neared its end. Not all did. Jaina winced. She couldn’t hope that no friendlies were out there; she knew some were, pilots who’d been shot down but might still be alive.
“Zero,” Iella said. “Hold positions.” And it began to rain.
It didn’t rain water. It rained columns of destructive energy, massed fire from turbolaser batteries far overhead, brilliant needles of light that poured into the jungle all around the kill zone.
The turbolaser blasts tore through vegetation, through everything beneath it. Blasts hitting trees detonated them in clouds of smoke. Beams hitting ponds and creeks and stagnant water sent up clouds of superheated steam. Beams flashed down through those clouds, but the manipulators of voids couldn’t see them coming, couldn’t maneuver the voids into place in time.
Jaina sat transfixed. This was orbital bombardment, what the Empire’s Star Destroyers had been built to do, what no Star Destroyer under the command of the New Republic had ever done. Jaina had heard about it, but it was just history, just some old-timey thing that no one ever had to worry about.
And now she was seeing it. Lusankya was finally fulfilling the purpose for which she had been built, before Jaina had even been born.
For four minutes, death rained down from overhead, in a circle neatly surrounding the kill zone. Then it stopped, and the rumbles, the screams uttered by bodies of water suddenly superheated, the bellows of distant rakamats meeting their doom, all died away.
Jaina jumped as her comlink crackled back into life. “Ground forces,” Wedge said, “commence mop-up.”
Coruscant
The repulsors on the descent units activated for the final portion of the descent. All the members of Luke’s group set down on the same roof—except for Kell Tainer, who hit the roof correctly, punched clean through its disintegrating duracrete surface, and ended up three stories down. “Not hurt,” he shouted up. “Hey, they’ve left behind some holodramas I haven’t seen.”
Luke pulled off his scorched environment suit as the others did the same. He took a look around. In the distance, he could see a flight of four