Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [66]
“Not bad.” Jaina consulted her comm board. “Four one-hundredths of a second between our shots, Kyp; yours hit second. We need to get those numbers down. Jag, you were twenty-six one-hundredths of a second behind Kyp. Pretty good, considering you didn’t know which container was going to be our target.”
“Actually, I did. I knew it wasn’t going to be the one our course was aimed at. Given a fifty-fifty directional choice, you go starboard more than half the time. I figured you wouldn’t choose the first target of opportunity in that direction, so I centered on the second. Of course, if I’d been wrong, it would have taken me a much bigger fraction of a second to hit the target you’d chosen.”
Jaina heaved a sigh. Jag was determined to annoy her with his efforts to predict her. But she schooled her emotions once more into something like serenity and merely clicked her comlink in acknowledgment. “Let’s go around again,” she said.
The second run was much like the first. Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots remained separated by a few hundredths of a second. Jag’s follow-up shot was, if anything, faster than it had been on the first target.
“You guessed I’d go left of our course, one target out,” Jaina said.
“Yes.”
“Let’s do it again.”
As Luke finished packing his bag for the day’s activities, Mara entered their quarters. Ben was awake in her arms, grasping at her hair, pulling it into his mouth, but all of Mara’s attention was on Luke. “I’m going to Coruscant with you.”
That stopped Luke cold. “What changed your mind?”
“Time. Time to calm down, time to figure things out. Understanding that there’s nobody more suited than you are to stopping the enemy that menaces Ben, and there’s nobody better than me at watching your back.” She shrugged, then looked down into the face of their son.
“Ultimately, it was figuring out that if I wait until Ben’s enemies are right in front of me before I kill them, I’ve already failed him.”
Mara’s expression was so melancholy that Luke felt his throat constrict. “Listen, I’m about to go out into the jungle with Tahiri to plant a few gravitic sensors. Care to come along?”
Mara nodded. “Do you think Leia would baby-sit for us?”
“I suspect she’d be very happy to.”
Luke, Mara, and Tahiri moved through the jungle a few hundred meters from the start of the kill zone. They’d entered the jungle, had gone through a series of steps to shake off any likely Yuuzhan Vong observers, and now reached the first of their target zones.
Luke set down his backpack. From within it he drew a short-hafted heavy hammer. “Behold,” he told Tahiri, “the favorite weapon of Jedi before the invention of the lightsaber.”
She frowned at him, green eyes confused beneath her bangs. “You’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding. C’mon. The Jedi sledgehammer?” Grinning, he turned to his wife. “Mara?”
From her own backpack she drew a stake, two-thirds of a meter long, made of metal, very broad at the top. She obligingly set it point-first into the ground. “Go ahead. I’ve always thought that menial labor involving hitting heavy metal things with other heavy metal things was man’s work.”
With quick, hard blows, Luke pounded the thing until its head was flush with the ground. Then he spread dirt and leaves over it.
“And that’s going to transmit gravitic fluctuations?” Tahiri sounded dubious.
“Uh-huh.” Luke replaced the hammer in his backpack, then picked the backpack up. It weighed less, several kilograms less, than it had when he set it down. He pretended not to notice, or to recognize that the ground beneath the pack was stirred up, when it had been smooth when he’d set the pack down. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Tahiri announced. Mara just nodded.
As they moved from