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Record Time was an armed troop transport. At nearly 170 meters, with two bulbous main portions—the larger stern housed the bridge and personnel bays, the smaller stern the engines—connected by a narrow access tube, the vessel looked impossibly vulnerable, impossibly fragile. But its captain-owner, a private trader—a smuggler, Luke believed—had volunteered its use to General Antilles during the fall of Coruscant, claiming it was the fastest, toughest vessel of its type. Now its bay was clear of trade goods and was filled with soldiers instead.

Luke’s comm unit hissed with a moment of static, then a woman’s voice: “Record Time to Twin Suns Leader, all set.”

“Twin Suns to Record Time, you set the pace. We won’t have any trouble staying where we need to be.”

The transport surged forward, not fast by starfighter standards, but quickly enough for a freighter. Luke calculated its rate of acceleration and brought his X-wing up in front of the freighter’s bridge. Mara and Corran settled in with him. Another shield trio dropped back to the port side of Record Time, a third to the starboard side, and the last astern of the transport.

All around Twin Suns Squadron, starfighter squadrons, frigates, destroyers, transports, and shuttles began accelerating to battle speed.

Luke heard Colonel Gavin Darklighter’s voice over the operation channel: “Rogue Squadron to Borleias. We’re back. We kicked your butt twenty years ago. Now we’re here to do it again.”

Luke grinned.

Squadrons of coralskippers were already climbing to their altitude by the time Twin Suns Squadron began its descent into atmosphere. Slightly longer than X-wings and comparable spacecraft, the coralskippers were far more massive. They were dense constructions of yorik coral, tapering toward the bow, broadening and deepening toward the stern, with rough exteriors reflecting their organic origins.

They could be quite beautiful, Luke had decided. The ones rising against them and the two they’d seen after leaving the Mon Mothma shared a color scheme, a pastel red and a pearlescent silver swirled together in a mottled pattern. At the bow, tucked into a sort of niche grown into the coral surface, was the round reddish shape of the dovin basal, the creature whose gravitic powers dragged the coralskipper from point to point in space and also brought up defensive voids that drank in damage like a Tatooine bantha drank water. On the top surface, just ahead of the point where the ship’s body swelled to its greatest width, was the canopy over the cockpit; this one was tinted blue.

Their beauty was irrelevant. As soon as they came within range, they opened up with their plasma cannons, life-forms that spewed superheated materials that could eat through a starfighter’s hull. “Break and engage, cover the transport,” Luke commanded, and suited action to words; he spun out in a rapid descent relative to the planet below and opened fire, trusting his wingmates to stay with him, to fire out of phase with him and at different portions of his target to overload and baffle the dovin basal. This time the creature defending his target skip intercepted Mara’s shot, fired from slightly below the skip’s centerline, but couldn’t whip the void around fast enough to counter Luke’s and Corran’s shots, which scoured the yorik coral all around the pilot’s canopy.

Superheated blobs from his target’s wingmate flashed toward Luke’s X-wing. Luke heard a squeal of alarm from R2-D2, who was tucked into the astromech bay behind his canopy, but ignored it as an irrelevant detail. He continued his rolling descent, varying the speed of his roll and distance covered each half a standard second, and saw the plasma flash between his snubfighter and Mara’s.

Then the three of them were well below their targets and rising again behind the coralskippers’ sterns. The skips’ voids swung around, hovering at the sterns, ready to soak up infinite amounts of weapon energy.

The first engagements between coralskippers and New Republic