• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And since only Jaina’s squadron had been attacked in this fashion, it meant that Yuuzhan Vong spotters on the ground or in Borleias orbit had identified her and correctly determined her course, suggesting that they were even more on the ball than Wedge and Tycho had guessed.

“How long before we can get anyone to her?” Wedge asked.

Tycho shrugged. “Two minutes to get the frigate Lunar Tide to the site. And that’ll just get Lunar Tide destroyed. Five minutes for the task force now leaving Borleias’s mass shadow.”

Wedge weighed the numbers, not forgetting that among them were numbers of the living crew of the vessels involved. How many lives was Jaina Solo worth? More important, how much harm would it do to them, to their plans, to demonstrate the New Republic habit, considered a weakness by the Yuuzhan Vong, to risk and probably doom a greater number of people to save a smaller number?

“Tell Lunar Tide to get into position to jump … but not jump until we give the order. They’ll wait for the task force unless we say otherwise.”

Tycho nodded and turned to his comm board.

With the discipline of decades, Wedge was able to conceal the way his decision tied his insides up in knots, and he prayed that he wouldn’t have to tell Han and Leia that he’d doomed their daughter.

* * *

“I can get the squad out of here,” Jag said.

“Care to share the information?” Jaina asked.

“It’ll take too long, Goddess. Care to trust me?”

Jaina weighed the question for part of a second and found that she did—if he said he knew how to get them out alive, then he did. “We’re your wing,” she said.

“You and Kyp, launch shadow bombs. Have them follow me at a distance of a few meters—as close as you can manage. You’ll know when to drop them. Hang back, let me lead you by a few kilometers.” Without waiting for further authorization or acknowledgment, Jag hit his thrusters and pulled out ahead of the Twin Suns formation.

Jaina felt slight confusion from Kyp, a sort of question mark. She offered up a mental shrug. She armed and launched one shadow bomb, then reached out to grab it with the Force and hurtle it along in Jag’s wake. She dimly detected Kyp’s similar efforts; his shadow bomb was well ahead of hers.

The foremost oncoming coralskippers were almost on Jag now, but he executed a starboard turn, as close to a right-angle turn as a TIE pilot could manage, and headed directly toward one of the Yuuzhan Vong interdictors, the one between their position and the safety of Borleias.

The oncoming coralskippers vectored to follow Jag. Jaina opened fire, spraying them with stuttering red laser bolts, and heeled over in Jag’s wake; she saw laserfire from her fellow pilots flashing into the cloud of skips, saw one of the Yuuzhan Vong craft detonate.

This was hard going. She had to fly, fire, and keep track of her shadow bomb in the Force—and the latter task was one of the more difficult, because Jag was jinking and juking as only a TIE or A-wing fighter pilot could, dodging incoming plasma cannon fire from the interdictor so nimbly and acrobatically that the chief danger to him was that he’d twitch into the path of a plasma projectile rather than having one seek and find him. Keeping the shadow bomb tucked in right behind him was proving an almost impossible task. Her bomb strayed to either side of Jag’s clawcraft with every sideslip he performed.

Then she felt Kyp reach to her through the Force. She could suddenly see his technique; she saw Jag’s living presence in the Force, and there were the two unliving things that were his shadow bombs, and Kyp had connected them as if encasing all three in a bubble so that whenever Jag moved, he himself drew the bomb along with him. Kyp was supplying the energy, but Jag, unknowing, was directing it. Jaina tried to do the same, tried to draw a connection between her bomb and Jag … and though, in that instant, she knew she hadn’t developed the degree of control Kyp had, she could tell that her shadow