Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [38]
Reth managed a tight smile. So far, so good.
“Sensors show a formation looping around the moon toward us.” The voice, quiet and controlled, was Corran’s, and it came across Luke’s private comlink, not the one built into his X-wing. Corran’s X-wing was several hundred kilometers behind the Twin Suns Squadron’s formation in lunar orbit, trailing it and acting as rear guard.
Luke nodded. The main sensor relay from the ground stations showed a column of coralskippers and frigate analogs on a straight approach toward Borleias, but the Yuuzhan Vong had obviously detected Twin Suns and sent a detachment around the moon to trap them between two forces. “Get back up here,” he told Corran. “Prepare a shadow bomb to drop.” The other pilots of Twin Suns weren’t Jedi and so weren’t capable of utilizing the shadow bomb weapons—proton torpedoes with their propulsion units removed, shoved across space merely by the powers of the Jedi mind—so he didn’t have to transmit these orders to them. He activated his snubfighter’s comlink on squadron frequency. “Prepare to follow me in.” He switched back to the scrambled frequency he shared with Corran and Zindra. “Thirty seconds before our pursuit gets into firing range, we accelerate straight toward the enemy column … but Corran and I leave the shadow bombs behind.”
Corran and Zindra responded with comlink clicks.
Sensors showed Yuuzhan Vong vessels far ahead, crossing the plane of lunar orbit on their approach toward Borleias. Luke could distantly see the running lights, or whatever the organic equivalents were, on the Yuuzhan Vong frigate analogs. Corran was much closer, approaching fast from the rear, and now Luke could detect the first blips indicating the detachment coming up behind Corran. “Drop shadow bombs,” he said, and kicked his accelerator into life as he dropped his own shadow bomb.
Twin Suns Squadron roared out from lunar orbit on a straight approach toward the main Yuuzhan Vong column. Their course had to be absolutely straight if the trick was to work.
His Force perceptions irrelevant, Luke kept his eye on the sensors. They showed the distant blip of Yuuzhan Vong pursuers growing less distant; they showed the tiny, coded comlink transmission from the shadow bombs left behind; they showed the alien column ahead, also getting closer and closer.
“They’re firing,” Zindra said, the high-pitched excitement of a novice in her voice, and Luke saw flashes of distant lava cannon misses in his peripheral vision.
Luke began juking and jinking, his attention divided between controlling his X-wing and and the shadow bomb he had launched.
The trailing force of coralskippers numbered about thirty; at this range, it was hard to get exact numbers. They were approaching the point where the Jedi had dropped the shadow bombs and were in a narrow approach formation, a speed formation. Luke nudged the shadow bombs into a line, each a few kilometers from the next, and watched their blips separate and line up in anticipation of the approaching skips.
He didn’t feel the coralskippers pass the rearmost shadow bomb; his Force perceptions couldn’t detect them. But the sensors showed the line of skips reach and begin to superimpose itself on the line of shadow bombs. He waited until the foremost skip reached the leading bomb, then reached out and squeezed with a small measure of his Force powers.
On the sensors, the clean line of coralskippers behind became a fuzzy mass, then began to fade. Where perhaps thirty skips had been in pursuit, half that number now looped away from the detonation point, in search of whatever mystery ship must have attacked them.
Luke snapped back to the here and now. Zindra’s X-wing was directly above him, its mass blocking his direct view