Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [22]
“What was that?” He could barely hear Wedge for the jamming. X-wings scattered. Two vectored right into the picket ship’s range. Luke’s viewscreen flashed.
Two blasts of painfully familiar human anguish wrenched Luke’s spine and stomach as Alliance pilots died. Not Wedge, he confirmed hastily, but they’d been people. Someone else’s friends. They’ll be missed. Mourned.
He regathered his wits and tried to shield himself better. He couldn’t grieve yet. Flashing red on the BAC screen, the picket ship was still tailing Wedge’s X-wing tightly.
Behind Luke, Captain Manchisco cleared her throat. “ ’Scuse me, Commander, but you’re leaving the Flurry wide open to—”
He was turning his head when the BAC board framed a crimson full alert: The Flurry itself was about to come under attack. Alien fighters whizzed past the viewscreen, reflecting crazy flashes of light. “Sure enough,” Luke said. “They saw it too. Crew’s yours.”
Manchisco’s black eyes brightened. She spun away and barked out a string of orders to her shipmates. The Duro gargled a question, waving long, knobby hands over his nav controls. Manchisco gargled back. The Flurry carried everything from gunners to shield operators. Luke concentrated on Wedge’s danger and closed out his own.
Miniature alien fighters had almost surrounded Wedge and his squadron, trapping them inside an escape-proof globe of energy shields and firepower. Luke fought down panic and funneled his emotional energy into the Force around and inside him.
He stretched out his own point of presence toward the tiny alien ship dead ahead of Wedge’s X-wing. Touching it, he clearly sensed two almost-human presences on board the small fighter. Shutting out the nauseating sense of twistedness, Luke brushed each presence. One controlled shields; the other, all remaining shipboard functions. Luke focused on the second, driving Force energy into its center. Though weak and faint, it resisted with tortured strength. Its misery goaded him toward despair: No one deserved to live free, its whole being declared. By its reckoning, Luke could do nothing for Wedge—and nothing to save himself—and nothing to save either human aboard the alien fighter. All were doomed.
Luke struggled to see through the stranger’s vision. The entire sphere of space opened around him. It overloaded his senses. He had to narrow his field of view to find Wedge’s X-wing. On either side of his projected presence, another pyramid hovered apparently motionless, flying in formation. From the center of each triangular face, a scanner/sensor cluster peered back like a compound eye. Laser cannon bristled at each corner.
Fear, anger, aggression: the dark side are they. Yoda had taught him that his methods were as critical as his motives. If he used dark power, even in self-defense, the cost to his soul might be disastrous.
He relaxed into the Force. Clinging to control for the sake of his soul and his sanity, he amplified the pitiful will. Its sense of humanity peaked, hopeless victory for a tortured spirit. It had lived, once—free. With all the intensity of the doomed, it longed to go on living.
Luke planted a suggestion in reply. But a good death is better than life enslaved to hatred, and peace is better than anguish.
With suddenness that startled him, the alien ship altered course directly for one of its squadron mates. It accelerated to ram. Luke wrenched free of the other human’s will and sat gasping and swallowing. He wiped drenched hair off his face.
A whoop in Luke’s headphones pierced his brain. It took him a second to refocus his mind on the carrier’s battle bridge, another second to refocus