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“That’s not what I’m going to do. Do you trust me?”

“Do it.”

They traded places then, Jaina suddenly opening up with her weapons, Kyp handing the task of flying evasively over to his reflexes while his mind went elsewhere.

Luke Skywalker had done this once, a couple of years ago. He’d mentioned it to the other Jedi. No one else had tried it because it had exhausted Luke to the point of collapse, and Jedi were seldom in a position to survive a technique that tired them so completely.

They were past the second wave of coralskippers now and heading toward the cloud surrounding Jag. Beyond it, not far now, was the second interdictor. Kyp knew that other skips had to be converging on him and Jaina. He didn’t bother to look at his sensor board. They weren’t relevant now.

And he didn’t think he’d be as terribly drained as Luke by the technique. He was stronger in the Force than Luke Skywalker.

He’d known that almost since they’d met—that he had more pure power than the legendary Jedi Master. But this was, perhaps, the first time he’d been able to say it to himself without a little thrill of pride. He was just stronger, and that was all. It usually didn’t matter. Now it did.

They reached the edge of the coralskipper cloud around Jag. Jaina and Kyp flashed by the skips that had turned against them, dodging their incoming fire, Jaina spraying return fire. Suddenly they were in the middle, with Jag’s clawcraft turning in their wake, and the interdictor was before them.

Absently, barely aiming, Kyp squeezed the trigger of his lasers. His red beams flashed out against the interdictor, and a void moved in position to intercept the beams.

Within the Force, within the broader range of senses it gave him, he tried to feel the presence of that void. He couldn’t feel the Yuuzhan Vong or their creatures, but he could feel distortions in space, hard little nuggets of wrongness where there should be nothing.

He felt many of them, but didn’t know which belonged to the interdictor, which to the coralskippers, and this rarefied sensory data didn’t precisely translate to exact directions and distances. A void that felt far away could be from a coralskipper close at hand.

He armed a proton torpedo and fired it. He felt its physical presence as, in a matter of seconds, it closed the distance between him and the interdictor … and was swallowed by another void.

He felt it enter the void, felt which of the many singularities it was.

And he seized upon that void, directing all his Force abilities and discipline against it.

It was like using a thin metal rod to push a grounded landspeeder. Too much pressure and it would bend, becoming useless. Too little and nothing would happen. He had to find the right pressure to budge it, to set it into motion and keep it going that way …

For a moment, the only things in the universe were him, Jaina, and the void. He moved the void, turned it around, moved it back the other direction.

Then he was himself again, in the cockpit, watching the flank of the interdictor distort. The void had moved back and touched the interdictor, and now the interdictor elongated into it, extending what looked like a pliant extrusion of what he knew to be hardened yorik coral into the singularity.

The portions of the interdictor in closest proximity to the void accelerated faster into its maw so that portions farther back tore, venting gases into space. But the incredible gravity of the singularity didn’t allow the remainder of the ship to tear away and be free. It dragged greater and greater portions of the interdictor into it, compressing them, rending them, and in a moment the interdictor was gone.

Kyp felt obliterated, bone-tired, as though he’d run for days, drawing on the Force to sustain him, and had finally settled down for rest. His diagnostics board was beeping at him and he spared it a glance. “I’ve taken damage,” he said. “A grutchin, I think.”

In fact, a portion of his cockpit, to starboard, was starting to blacken, with acrid smoke pouring off it. Idly, he pulled his lightsaber from his belt and