"Wraw," Leia said sharply, but Meloque only waved her sucker-equipped hand in dismissal.

"What other att.i.tude can be expected from a member of a species that has declared its intent to exterminate the Yuuzhan Vong?" Meloque was referring to the Bothan doctrine of ar'krai, or total war.

Wraw laughed.

"I was only joking."

His head fur betrayed nothing. Leia waited until Meloque and Ferfer had left to search for additional sh.e.l.ls before she went over to Wraw.

"I don't think Meloque appreciates your sense of humor."

Wraw shrugged.

"What can I say? We're worlds apart."

"Then your cynicism doesn't stem from your commitment to an amoral, unprofitable career?"

"Amoral, maybe, but certainly not unprofitable."

"In terms of credits, you mean."

"What other terms are there?" Leia glanced at Han, who merely spread his hands. "Go ahead and poke him if you want to. I won't try to stop you."

Just then Page and Kyp returned to camp. Page looked from Han to Leia to Wraw, then back to Han.

"We interrupting something?"

"Just a little campfire sing-along," Han said.

Page didn't ask for an explanation.

"We found signs of a Yuuzhan Vong patrol-tracker beasts and a couple of those twelve-legged mounts."

"Bissops and quenaks," Sa.s.so said, getting to his feet. "We'd better get moving. The sooner we cross the next ridge, the better."

Everyone pitched in to load the remaining gear. With Ferfer riding point, they climbed to the crest of the ridge, then began a slow, switchback descent through dense forest. Sa.s.so, Page, and Kyp rode ahead to scout the trail. Halfway to the valley floor, Han spurred his timbu to come abreast of Wraw's.

"I figure you spend a lot of your time hanging around with low-life characters," Han said. "But everyone here is on the same side, understand?"

"You're one to talk about consorting with low-life characters, Solo."

Han forced a smile.

"I got over it, pal. So maybe you should look to me as an example."

The Bothan nodded.

"I'll give it thought."

Han fell back to ride alongside Leia.

"Why do you even bother?" she asked.

"Well, either I'm going to change his mind, or I'm going to change his face."

"You still won't be rearranging the person inside."

"Maybe not, but I'll feel a whole lot better."

Leia heard rapid hoofbeats up ahead, and a moment later Kyp rode up.

"Yuuzhan Vong. They're climbing out the valley." He pointed down through the trees. "Just there-at that stand of broadleafs."

"Is there a way to avoid them?" Leia asked. "No. And we can't afford to fight them here." Han rose up on his stirrups and motioned to an outcropping of rocks below the next switchback. "Looks like a decent ambush point."

Kyp nodded. "That's my thinking, too."

They hastened through the switchback and into a gulch, where Sa.s.so and Page were waiting. Ferfer led the mounts away, and everyone else scrambled to take up firing positions in the boulders on both sides of the trail-Han, Leia, Page, and Meloque on one side; Wraw, Sa.s.so, and Kyp on the other. Han sighted down the barrel of the military blaster; Page did the same with the DC-15 rifle. Meloque wrapped her huge hand around the wooden grip of the antique sidearm. Leia took hold of her lightsaber, but didn't activate it. Shortly they heard the patrol approaching.

First to appear were a trio of bissop hounds. Low-bodied creatures, they moved in a waddling motion, their long snouts sniffing the air and ground, and their clawed feet leaving distinctive tracks in the dirt.

Behind them walked three Yuuzhan Vong warriors armed with amphistaffs and bandoliers of thud and razor bugs. Two were sporting shoulder-mounted tactical villips. Behind them came three warriors on riding beasts as large as grutchyna but as sedate as rontos.

"I'll take the tracker on the right," Page whispered to Han. "You take the one in the middle. Go for the villips first."

Page waved a signal across the canyon to where Kyp and the others were concealed. Then everyone hunkered down to wait for the patrol to move into the crossfire. The bissops lifted their snouts toward the boulders just as the first blasterbolts were raining down on them. Han's and Page's shots blew the two small villips to pieces, while sizzling red bolts from across the ravine knocked two warriors from their mounts. But even though taken by surprise, the Yuuzhan Vong were quick to counterattack. Razor and thud bugs swarmed into the air, and-rearing and snarling-the three bissops surged up into the rocks.

By then Han, Page, Leia, and Meloque were already in motion, firing on the run and scampering for new positions. A bolt from Han's heavy blaster shattered the skull of a charging bissop. A second bolt caught one of the trackers squarely in the chest, blowing a smoking hole in the warrior's vonduun crab armor and sending him flying backward, to be trampled underfoot by a confused quenak. Running down the opposite outcropping, Wraw came within a meter of being bissop fodder, but a well-placed shot from Sa.s.so dropped the beast before it could snap at the Bothan a second time...

Kyp front-flipped down onto the trail ahead of the patrol.

Lightsaber ignited, he fought his way through a hail of razor bugs to take the fight to the remaining warriors. Han was astonished to see the Jedi's blade neatly cleave a rigid amphistaff, then, on the reverse stroke, sever the head of the warrior himself. Still in the rocks, Leia was similarly engaged in fending off a stream of frenzied bugs. Meloque was cowering below her, afraid to show her head. Pulling the frightened Ho'Din to her feet, Leia led her to a safer position, whirling twice to send return flights of bugs smashing into the rocks. Han emerged from the boulders to see Kyp kick a coufee out of the hand of the only Yuuzhan Vong left standing, then pierce the warrior through the neck as he was running for his mount, as if in an attempt to flee.

A blur of motion drew Han's attention to the left, and he swung around, flattening himself to the ground. The last of the three bissops hurdled him and bounded up into the rocks, close to where Meloque was crouched, staring distractedly at her heavy-gripped blaster.

Unable to get a clear shot at the retreating beast, Page shouted to Meloque: "Kill the hound!"

She glanced at the escaping bissop, then in bewilderment at Wraw.

"It's just an animal-"

"Kill it!" Page repeated.

Bolts from Wraw's weapon stopped the bissop dead, just short of its disappearing over the rim of the gulch.

"Butchers," the Ho'Din said as sudden quiet descended. She staggered out of the rocks, and down onto the trail to join Leia and the others. "Butchers!"

"Bissops are trained to return to base," Page said calmly. "Another patrol would have picked up our trail in no time flat."

Meloque heard him out, then nodded dully. Six Yuuzhan Vong, two lizard-hounds, and one quenak lay sprawled in the dirt. Page moved from warrior to warrior, making certain that each was dead. He put the convulsing quenak out of its misery with a single bolt, then did the same to three amphistaffs. Han squatted down beside the warrior he had shot in the chest, then regarded the thirty-year-old weapon that had supplied the lethal bolt.

"I never knew these old blasters packed such a wallop."

"They don't," Kyp said from where he was crouched near another warrior. He rapped his knuckles against the breastplate of the Yuuzhan Vong's living armor. "Inferior armor, inferior weapons, inferior troops."

He glanced around. "Even the bissops were slow."

Leia glanced at Sa.s.so in sudden uncertainty.

"Another side effect of the heat wave?"

The Rodian shook his head in perplexity.

"Let me get this straight," Wraw said. "You're disappointed because we won too easily?" He snorted a laugh. "I'm beginning to wonder if all of you aren't sympathizers."

"He's right." Page said. "We can use every bit of luck we get."

"I've played enough sabacc to know luck when I see it," Han said, "and this wasn't it." He scanned the boulders and nearby trees. "They could be luring us into a trap."

Kyp glanced at him.

"Something else is going on here," he said.

TWENTY-TWO.

Rimward of the Tion Hegemony, Jaina watched the Yuuzhan Vong armada revert from hypers.p.a.ce once again. One moment it appeared that ten thousand stars had been eclipsed; the next, that that part of the galaxy had gained a new star cl.u.s.ter. Cappie shrilled and squeaked, underscoring its obvious distress by spotting the c.o.c.kpit's display screen with countless glowing bezels. In the same instant, two cinder-black A-wings that had been Jaina's starboard companions for the past hour fell away in stealth, and made the jump to lightspeed. Despite the glowing threat-a.s.sessment screen and her previous sightings of the armada, Jaina was staggered by the sheer number of ships the Yuuzhan Vong had ama.s.sed.

Closeups of the vessels provided by the starfighter's long-range scanners showed their pitted hulls to be marked and etched with cryptic symbols and blackened with what looked like war paint but was probably blood.

Many displayed slender tendrils of yorik coral, from which flew sail-like battle standards. Evidenced by melt circles and areas of carbon scoring, some of the ships were clearly veterans of earlier campaigns, uprooted from occupied systems throughout the invasion corridor. Others looked newly commissioned-newly grown-including an enormous rose-colored oval that had to be the flagship. The fact that the Yuuzhan Vong had essentially entrusted hundreds of conquered worlds to the protection of patrol craft and ground troops meant not only that they were willing to risk everything they had gained on one conclusive battle, but also that their intent was nothing less than the obliteration of the Alliance fleets.

Cappie sent another transmission to the c.o.c.kpit, and Jaina clutched the control yoke in pulse-quickening antic.i.p.ation. A pyrotechnic display of globular explosions began to fire-brighten the leading edge of the mobile cl.u.s.ter of ships, and a dozen bezels disappeared from the display screen. Again the Yuuzhan Vong had moved headlong into an expansive arc of smart mines that had been sown at the jump point. But as had occurred at the Perlemian transit point, the explosions began to taper off almost immediately, until there were only isolated bursts, and many of the undetonated mines disappeared, vacuumed into immense singularities created by dovin basals.

Jaina pressed her chin to the helmet's microphone stud.

"Quermia controller, this is Twin Suns One. The beast has arrived and opened the packages we left."

"Did the packages come as a surprise?"

"Not for long enough to give the beast any pause."

"What is the status of your companions?"

"Heralds are away."

"Can you corroborate the beast's current vector?"

Jaina keyed a short request to the R2-B3 droid, which replied with tones and buzzes that became text on the display screen.

"Bearing toward jump coordinates for Mon Calamari."

"Copy that, Twin Suns One. You are green to depart, and reposition to Mon Calamari Extreme. Rendezvous at Iceberg Three, with Vanguard, Scimitar, and Rogue Squadrons."

Jaina signed off the command net and switched over to the tactical frequency.

"All pilots, this is Twin Suns Leader. Instruct your droids to set coordinates for Mon Cal Extreme. Jump to lightspeed at my zero count.

Ten, nine, eight, seven..."

Jaina sat back in her chair and waited for the X-wing's Incom hyperdrive to engage. The jump would be Twin Suns' third and final since they had first observed the armada emerge from hypers.p.a.ce. All major staging points between the Perlemian Trade Route and Mon Calamari had been strewn with mines months earlier, primarily to discourage enemy forays. But Alliance command hadn't expected an armada to use the transit jump points, and now every fleet strategist was pondering why the Yuuzhan Vong hadn't jumped directly from the Trade Route to the Mon Calamari system.

Had the enemy committed another tactical blunder, or were they merely testing the waters? Perhaps they suspected that the Alliance had positioned forces at jump points convenient to Mon Calamari, in the hope of outflanking the armada once the battle commenced. At each transit point Jaina had sent updates to a frigate stationed at Quermia, which was serving as a hypers.p.a.ce transceiver.

The frigate relayed the intelligence to the MCCC Fleet Annex. But a redundant system was also in place, in the form of courier ships, some of which had jumped to Quermia, and others to Mon Calamari. By now other couriers were certainly alerting the battle groups designated for Toong'l and Caluula, where withdrawing elements from the armada would be prevented from jumping to the aid of soon-to-be embattled Coruscant. The transit to Mon Calamari would also be the longest of the three, so Jaina took advantage of the lull to center herself in the Force. She thought briefly of her parents, executing a mission on Caluula, and of Jacen, wherever he was.

But she didn't attempt to reach out to any of them. Everyone had their separate duties to perform, and she knew instinctively that the scattered members of her family were thinking of her, just as she was of them. Nor were there any Jedi among Twin Suns for her to touch through the Force.

With Kyp on Caluula, as well, Octa Ramis had been a.s.signed to lead the Dozen, and both Lowbacca and Alema Rar were commanding their own squadrons. Madurrin, Streen, and some of the other Jedi were stationed on those capital ships that were essential to defending Mon Calamari itself against the enemy onslaught. Having set her inner chrono to rouse her before the X- wing reverted from hypers.p.a.ce, she returned to full awareness just seconds before Cappie signaled her with a ready tone. She took a calming breath and waited for the stars to reappear.

Mon Calamari Extreme was just that: the far reaches of the star system, where the armada would likely decant. Iceberg Three was the code for the penultimate of the system's eight satellites-a misshapen chunk of frozen waste; in fact, a captured comet destined at some point in time to collide with the outermost planet. Silhouetted against the small white spheroid were dozens of Alliance cruisers, destroyers and carriers, along with hundreds of starfighters. It struck Jaina that nearly every vessel that had been in production for the past forty standard years was represented in one form or another, from Rendili StarDrive Dreadnaughts to Rejuvenator-cla.s.s Star Destroyers.

And the gathered ships const.i.tuted only the outer circle of defense. Despite the fortifying exercises she had taken herself through during the hypers.p.a.ce flight, Jaina realized that her heart was pounding and her hands were trembling. This is actually going to happen, she told herself with a stubborn measure of disbelief. The end of the war and the fate of the galaxy might well be decided over the course of the next few days.

"Welcome back, Twin Suns Leader," a recognizable voice said into her helmet earphones.

"Thanks, Wedge," she said. "I feel like I've been away for a week."

"Terrific work, Jaina. Your rally point is Iceberg Three, at four-seven-nine ecliptic. You're to stand by until the seeding's concluded."

"Copy, Alliance control. Standing by."

Instructing Twin Suns to form up on her, Jaina led the squadron to its a.s.signed coordinates, at fixed orbit over the frozen spheroid, in the company of a wing of starfighters made up of Rogue, Vanguard, Scimitar, Blackmoon, and Tesar Sabatyne's Wild Knights.

"Hey, Sticks," another familiar voice said. Jaina opened a channel to Gavin Darklighter.

"How long have you been sitting here, Rogue One?"

"Too long. Was Intelligence correct about the number of Vong ships?"

"I think they underestimated."

Before Gavin could respond, Wedge broke in.