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Jag had made a clean solo kill against one of the starboard skips. That left two damaged, one unhurt, of the six that had come against them. Jaina’s sensor board showed that one of her pilots, Twin Suns Ten, was drifting powerless, but Eleven had reported that Ten was still alive.

Then there was something else on her long-range sensors, two large red blips arriving from the opposite directions at high speed, just now slowing as they reached the vicinity of the target zone. They were the right size for Yuuzhan Vong corvette analogs, and as Jaina watched, the blips fired off many more, smaller blips—signs of a coralskipper launch. “The second wave is here,” she told her squad. “Rogues, Blackmoons, Wild Knights, watch out for reinforcements at your end.”

She received three sets of acknowledgments but barely registered them as her wing trio scored quick kills on the undamaged coralskipper and one of the damaged ones. The last Yuuzhan Vong pilot from the original six turned away, toward one of the oncoming flood of coralskipper reinforcements.

Jaina let him go. Other survivors of the two first Yuuzhan Vong squadrons were also scattering back toward their reinforcements. None of them appeared to be pursuing the rapidly retreating Starlancer vehicle or the drifting Twin Suns Ten. Jaina called for her squad to muster in the few seconds available to them. “Rogues, have they sprung the same trap at your end?”

“Negative, Twins Leader.”

“Wild Knights just have the original squads, though resistance is stiffening.”

“Same with Blackmoon, Twins.”

“These are interdictors, Leader.” That was Piggy’s voice. “They’re not here for the Starlancers. They’re here for you.”

“Plot us a course out of here, Piggy. Away from the Starlancers’ escape vector.”

A bare second later, a projected course sprang up on Jaina’s nav computer. It didn’t lead through the area showing the most open space. Jaina wondered why Piggy had deliberately ignored that most logical option—and then realized that he’d probably done so because it was the most logical option, and one the Yuuzhan Vong had doubtless planned on her choosing. He had to have seen other things she’d missed for him to decide on this course.

Whatever his reasoning, she oriented along his escape vector and fired her thrusters at full acceleration. The rest of Twin Suns came up smoothly behind her. Ahead, Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers began to congregate on her escape route; behind, more skips turned in her wake, accelerating to catch up. Her sensor board suggested that the eleven Twin Suns pilots now faced five times as many skips.

A microjump away, a fraction of a light-year outside the Pyria system, Han and Leia listened to the holocomm traffic from their daughter’s battle zone. “I’m going back,” Han said.

Leia looked as ashen as Han felt. Slowly, she shook her head. “We can’t help her.”

“The hell we can’t. I can get her escape vector, and we can drill a hole in from the other side before the Vong know we’re coming—”

“Fine. What do you want me to tell our passengers, the children?”

Han gave an inarticulate growl. He sat with muscles locked, listening to find out what would become of his daughter.

“We screwed up,” Wedge said. As usual during missions of any importance, he stood in the control chamber beside the hologram displaying the mission zone.

Tycho nodded, looking glum. He didn’t elaborate on Wedge’s words.

He didn’t need to. The two of them had had the mission and the Yuuzhan Vong response plotted out in great detail. The Yuuzhan Vong would, at some point, make an attempt to grab the Starlancer vehicles. The pilots of the pipefighters would be theoretically able to detach their cockpits, which had their own rudimentary thrusters, and escape, destroying the pipe assemblies with primitive mechanical self-destruct systems that were unlikely to be affected by enemy countermeasures, leaving behind just enough clues to give the Yuuzhan Vong a hint of what was going on.

But that whole approach