Ebaq 9, Monday Fandom time
It was the middle of whatever passed for night when the attack finally came. Then it was to the X-wings to be pounded on by the Vong, more or less on purpose. Which was the plan, of course: the Vong would be drawn in, find them at a dead end planet with insufficient forces... right up till the time they got slammed with the appearance of Ralroost, Kyp's Dozen, the Wild Knights, the Rogues, the Falcon, and seemingly every Jedi they could find to add to the battle meld.
Which wasn't to say the battle was easy. They'd started with thirteen in Twin Suns with John and were down to nine, and only Lowie's was fully intact. Jaina had lost her wingmate for the second time since the beginning of the war. She was feeling panicked and scared and angry and was trying to use it to the best of her ability. And she could tell even from here that the Vong had voxyn. That didn't affect her in the cockpit of her X-wing, but still, it was hard to ignore that presence on the edge of her consciousness.
Most of the fighting had passed them by, and she was about to order her squadron to assist Kyp's squadron and Saba Sebatyne's Wild Knights, but she felt Jacen touch on her before his voice came over her comm. "Don't. You're too shot up."
"I can feel the others fighting," Jaina countered. "I can't stand by."
"You must. The others would only endanger themselves protecting you."
There was a little part of her that remembered what Mara had told her back on Duro, about not fighting when your edge was blunted. It was easy to say, but not so easy to actually put into practice.
"You have acquitted yourself honorably, Jaina Solo," Saba chimed in. "It is not your task to preserve your own life." Apparently Saba had missed a memo.
On the heels of that came Ebaq 9's call that she was clear to return to base, and Jaina knew she had no real choice but to get her squadron back to safety.
They probably would have been better off staying out, crippled ships or no. They hadn't even been back on Ebaq 9 long enough to part ways before word came down that there were Vong abandoning the battle in space in order to head toward the little defenseless moon with absolutely no military value. They were following her. This was the problem with being bait.
"Back to the fighters!" Jaina ordered. "We'll launch and get out of the enemy's sight."
"That's a negative, Twin Leader," General Farlander came over the comm. And if he said it, she couldn't disobey. "Just get into the mineshafts and slam the blast doors behind you. Stick to the plan. You can hold out for hours in there, and we'll come get you before you know it."
"The general is wise, Jaina," Tesar added. "Our starfighterz are too damaged to make a clean escape. Several of us would be losst."
He was right, and she knew it. And she couldn't do that to them. So, okay, fine, she was wrong today and everyone else was right, or something. "Understood, General," she commed back, and as the rest of the command center began preparing for the oncoming attack, she nodded to her pilots and said, "Right. This way."
She drove the other eight to the armory in the hovercar, announcing, "I'm going to assume that everything else is going to go wrong. I want everyone here to have blasters, body armor, grenades, grenade launchers, and command-detonated mines. And vac suits- we're pressurized here, but what can be pressurized can be depressurized."
"Grenades, blasters, and body armor? If it wasn't for the vac suits, I'd say Christmas came early this year," John quipped.
Jaina was a little too panicked to be amused. "Yeah, we'll see how long you think that," she said.
"I dunno, Major, I'm used to some pretty awkward holidays," John teased. It wasn't like there was anything else they could be doing while they rode to the armory. Worrying wasn't going to help anyone, as far as John was concerned.
"Not the time," Jaina said, starting to grab the assigned weaponry and hand it out. "Suit up."
*****
In the mines, behind the blast shields, it was dark enough to order the others to turn on their helmet and belt lights while they waited. It wasn't like they had anything to see but each other, but it seemed to make others less anxious to not sit around in total darkness. Waiting on an attack you had to hide from was never fun, so some anxiousness was warranted.
And after a while of waiting, it became more warranted. Jaina and the other Jedi, Lowie and Tesar, could sense what was going on through the meld, could sense the absence of presence that was the Yuuzhan Vong. Here. Along with that, there was the absolute opposite of what she felt from them, a presence she recognized completely as voxyn. And they'd be able to tell exactly where she was. From Lowbacca's snark, he felt it, too.
"Remind me to tell the high command how much I hate their battle plan," she grumbled.
"Tell high command how much you hate their plan," John muttered from his place with the other pilots.
The high command's battle plan accounted for the Vong having a dozen doors to choose from, several booby-trapped, others leading to nowhere, and the chances of them actually picking Jaina's door were pretty slim. It didn't account for something that could find her. It didn't account for them trying to bypass the doors to get to her. When she saw the wall in front of them starting to crack, she ordered, "Bring the roof down. Right here. Stand back."
Tesar and Lowie knew exactly what she meant, reaching out with the Force to find the cracks in the ceiling, expanding on them, and a half-ton overhead boulders came down with a sudden crash, followed by debris and rubble. She widened the hole overhead, gouging at the rock and bringing more of it down.
Then a shriek seemed to steal the breath from her throat, and a voxyn was there, somehow managing to writhe through the storm of falling rock and leap into the midst of Jaina's party. She had forgotten how fast they were.
She managed to get a Force shield up in time to deflect a hail of toxic spit, and leapt over the first lash of the tail while she drew her lightsaber and ignited the violet blade. There was a thud and a cry behind her. Blasters flamed in the dark, combined space, and concussion grenades slapped her ears. Lowbacca was slashing at the thing's head, the brilliance of his lightsaber reflecting off the voxyn's glittering eyes.
The tunnel reeked of the voxyn's acid spit. The tail lashed a second time and Jaina leapt again, then came down slashing at the tail. The tail parted near its root, and acrid blood spattered Jaina's vac suit.
And then the three Jedi were fighting side by side, lightsabers swinging in a frenzy of close combat against teeth and claws and poison and sheer single-minded viciousness. Whenever one of the other pilots could, he let fly with a blaster. Blood and acid spattered and hissed on the tunnel walls.
The voxyn didn't stop fighting until it was literally cut to pieces, and the fight left Jaina exhausted, gasping for breath and leaning against the wall of the shaft. She had taken only a few breaths when she heard the howl of Vong warriors, and looked up to see them filling the tunnel just beyond her rock barrier.
A barrage of thud bugs came over the obstruction, followed by a mob of warriors scrabbling over the fallen stone. Jaina fired her blaster rifle left-handed at point-blank range while using her lightsaber to slice the thud bugs that came at her.
"The roof!" she gasped. "Let's get the roof down!"
She and Tesar and Lowbacca united their Force talents once more and clawed at the roof, bringing down rubble and stones at first, then boulders. Blaster bolts ricocheted among the rocks, reflecting in all directions- Jaina parried one with her violet blade. And then the roof was down with the sound of thunder, a billowing cloud wall of dust rolling down the mineshaft toward Jaina. She had seen at least half a dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors buried.
"Pull back," she ordered, and it was only then that she found she had casualties. Her stomach queased when as she saw Twin Four sprawled against the wall where the voxyn's tail had thrown him, his vac suit punctured by a score of poison spines. Twin Seven had been hit in the chest by a thud bug and knocked sprawling. He claimed he'd just had the wind knocked out of him, but Jaina didn't like the way his face shivered with pain when the others stood him on his feet.
Two carried Twin Four's body to the rear, and another two supported Twin Seven. The Jedi stayed behind as rear-guard until they reached a three-way intersection The pilots again halted, and John looked over his shoulder. "Which way, Major?"
Jaina pulled her datapad from the pocket on her sleeve and looked at it. The map seemed to swirl before her eyes. She was too tired to think properly, she realized. She forced her mind to work on the problem.
"You go left," she said. "Streak and Tesar and I are going straight ahead."
"Wait, you're splitting us up?" John repeated, his blood going cold at the thought of what her plan intended to do: save the pilots and sacrifice the Jedi.
"We can fight, Major!" Twin Ten insisted. "We can help you!"
That was sweet of them, Jaina thought. "I appreciate it, but-"
"We didn't come this far just to have you three go off to fight the Vong on your own," Twin Ten continued.
"You made us a team, and we're sticking together," John added firmly.
There was a part of her that was honestly touched by this. She'd put them through tests and drills and kept on them trying to get them to this point, to make them this sort of team. It was just that right now, that wasn't going to work if it got them all killed.
She straightened and took a breath and looked between Twin Ten and John. "Do I have to make this an order?"
Twin Ten's face showed his anger and frustration even as he backed down. "I guess not, Major."
John was a different story. He wanted to argue and tell her there was no way she was acting as bait without him standing beside her, but there he was, helping Twin Seven walk and knowing how things had to go. He beat his feelings back as best he could as he nodded once. "Good luck, Major."
Jaina wasn't really thinking in terms of sacrifice right now. At the same time, she knew how badly things could go, and she could possibly be saying goodbye now. The fact that she wasn't taking it as a foregone conclusion said a lot. "I'll see you when this is over," she promised, even if she looked mostly to John when she said it.
[TBC! NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Cowritten with the fantastic missed_the_gate, with most of the dialogue and one huge chunk taken from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon WIlliams. This totally got sped up cuz Pard told me to. *credits*]
Which wasn't to say the battle was easy. They'd started with thirteen in Twin Suns with John and were down to nine, and only Lowie's was fully intact. Jaina had lost her wingmate for the second time since the beginning of the war. She was feeling panicked and scared and angry and was trying to use it to the best of her ability. And she could tell even from here that the Vong had voxyn. That didn't affect her in the cockpit of her X-wing, but still, it was hard to ignore that presence on the edge of her consciousness.
Most of the fighting had passed them by, and she was about to order her squadron to assist Kyp's squadron and Saba Sebatyne's Wild Knights, but she felt Jacen touch on her before his voice came over her comm. "Don't. You're too shot up."
"I can feel the others fighting," Jaina countered. "I can't stand by."
"You must. The others would only endanger themselves protecting you."
There was a little part of her that remembered what Mara had told her back on Duro, about not fighting when your edge was blunted. It was easy to say, but not so easy to actually put into practice.
"You have acquitted yourself honorably, Jaina Solo," Saba chimed in. "It is not your task to preserve your own life." Apparently Saba had missed a memo.
On the heels of that came Ebaq 9's call that she was clear to return to base, and Jaina knew she had no real choice but to get her squadron back to safety.
They probably would have been better off staying out, crippled ships or no. They hadn't even been back on Ebaq 9 long enough to part ways before word came down that there were Vong abandoning the battle in space in order to head toward the little defenseless moon with absolutely no military value. They were following her. This was the problem with being bait.
"Back to the fighters!" Jaina ordered. "We'll launch and get out of the enemy's sight."
"That's a negative, Twin Leader," General Farlander came over the comm. And if he said it, she couldn't disobey. "Just get into the mineshafts and slam the blast doors behind you. Stick to the plan. You can hold out for hours in there, and we'll come get you before you know it."
"The general is wise, Jaina," Tesar added. "Our starfighterz are too damaged to make a clean escape. Several of us would be losst."
He was right, and she knew it. And she couldn't do that to them. So, okay, fine, she was wrong today and everyone else was right, or something. "Understood, General," she commed back, and as the rest of the command center began preparing for the oncoming attack, she nodded to her pilots and said, "Right. This way."
She drove the other eight to the armory in the hovercar, announcing, "I'm going to assume that everything else is going to go wrong. I want everyone here to have blasters, body armor, grenades, grenade launchers, and command-detonated mines. And vac suits- we're pressurized here, but what can be pressurized can be depressurized."
"Grenades, blasters, and body armor? If it wasn't for the vac suits, I'd say Christmas came early this year," John quipped.
Jaina was a little too panicked to be amused. "Yeah, we'll see how long you think that," she said.
"I dunno, Major, I'm used to some pretty awkward holidays," John teased. It wasn't like there was anything else they could be doing while they rode to the armory. Worrying wasn't going to help anyone, as far as John was concerned.
"Not the time," Jaina said, starting to grab the assigned weaponry and hand it out. "Suit up."
*****
In the mines, behind the blast shields, it was dark enough to order the others to turn on their helmet and belt lights while they waited. It wasn't like they had anything to see but each other, but it seemed to make others less anxious to not sit around in total darkness. Waiting on an attack you had to hide from was never fun, so some anxiousness was warranted.
And after a while of waiting, it became more warranted. Jaina and the other Jedi, Lowie and Tesar, could sense what was going on through the meld, could sense the absence of presence that was the Yuuzhan Vong. Here. Along with that, there was the absolute opposite of what she felt from them, a presence she recognized completely as voxyn. And they'd be able to tell exactly where she was. From Lowbacca's snark, he felt it, too.
"Remind me to tell the high command how much I hate their battle plan," she grumbled.
"Tell high command how much you hate their plan," John muttered from his place with the other pilots.
The high command's battle plan accounted for the Vong having a dozen doors to choose from, several booby-trapped, others leading to nowhere, and the chances of them actually picking Jaina's door were pretty slim. It didn't account for something that could find her. It didn't account for them trying to bypass the doors to get to her. When she saw the wall in front of them starting to crack, she ordered, "Bring the roof down. Right here. Stand back."
Tesar and Lowie knew exactly what she meant, reaching out with the Force to find the cracks in the ceiling, expanding on them, and a half-ton overhead boulders came down with a sudden crash, followed by debris and rubble. She widened the hole overhead, gouging at the rock and bringing more of it down.
Then a shriek seemed to steal the breath from her throat, and a voxyn was there, somehow managing to writhe through the storm of falling rock and leap into the midst of Jaina's party. She had forgotten how fast they were.
She managed to get a Force shield up in time to deflect a hail of toxic spit, and leapt over the first lash of the tail while she drew her lightsaber and ignited the violet blade. There was a thud and a cry behind her. Blasters flamed in the dark, combined space, and concussion grenades slapped her ears. Lowbacca was slashing at the thing's head, the brilliance of his lightsaber reflecting off the voxyn's glittering eyes.
The tunnel reeked of the voxyn's acid spit. The tail lashed a second time and Jaina leapt again, then came down slashing at the tail. The tail parted near its root, and acrid blood spattered Jaina's vac suit.
And then the three Jedi were fighting side by side, lightsabers swinging in a frenzy of close combat against teeth and claws and poison and sheer single-minded viciousness. Whenever one of the other pilots could, he let fly with a blaster. Blood and acid spattered and hissed on the tunnel walls.
The voxyn didn't stop fighting until it was literally cut to pieces, and the fight left Jaina exhausted, gasping for breath and leaning against the wall of the shaft. She had taken only a few breaths when she heard the howl of Vong warriors, and looked up to see them filling the tunnel just beyond her rock barrier.
A barrage of thud bugs came over the obstruction, followed by a mob of warriors scrabbling over the fallen stone. Jaina fired her blaster rifle left-handed at point-blank range while using her lightsaber to slice the thud bugs that came at her.
"The roof!" she gasped. "Let's get the roof down!"
She and Tesar and Lowbacca united their Force talents once more and clawed at the roof, bringing down rubble and stones at first, then boulders. Blaster bolts ricocheted among the rocks, reflecting in all directions- Jaina parried one with her violet blade. And then the roof was down with the sound of thunder, a billowing cloud wall of dust rolling down the mineshaft toward Jaina. She had seen at least half a dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors buried.
"Pull back," she ordered, and it was only then that she found she had casualties. Her stomach queased when as she saw Twin Four sprawled against the wall where the voxyn's tail had thrown him, his vac suit punctured by a score of poison spines. Twin Seven had been hit in the chest by a thud bug and knocked sprawling. He claimed he'd just had the wind knocked out of him, but Jaina didn't like the way his face shivered with pain when the others stood him on his feet.
Two carried Twin Four's body to the rear, and another two supported Twin Seven. The Jedi stayed behind as rear-guard until they reached a three-way intersection The pilots again halted, and John looked over his shoulder. "Which way, Major?"
Jaina pulled her datapad from the pocket on her sleeve and looked at it. The map seemed to swirl before her eyes. She was too tired to think properly, she realized. She forced her mind to work on the problem.
"You go left," she said. "Streak and Tesar and I are going straight ahead."
"Wait, you're splitting us up?" John repeated, his blood going cold at the thought of what her plan intended to do: save the pilots and sacrifice the Jedi.
"We can fight, Major!" Twin Ten insisted. "We can help you!"
That was sweet of them, Jaina thought. "I appreciate it, but-"
"We didn't come this far just to have you three go off to fight the Vong on your own," Twin Ten continued.
"You made us a team, and we're sticking together," John added firmly.
There was a part of her that was honestly touched by this. She'd put them through tests and drills and kept on them trying to get them to this point, to make them this sort of team. It was just that right now, that wasn't going to work if it got them all killed.
She straightened and took a breath and looked between Twin Ten and John. "Do I have to make this an order?"
Twin Ten's face showed his anger and frustration even as he backed down. "I guess not, Major."
John was a different story. He wanted to argue and tell her there was no way she was acting as bait without him standing beside her, but there he was, helping Twin Seven walk and knowing how things had to go. He beat his feelings back as best he could as he nodded once. "Good luck, Major."
Jaina wasn't really thinking in terms of sacrifice right now. At the same time, she knew how badly things could go, and she could possibly be saying goodbye now. The fact that she wasn't taking it as a foregone conclusion said a lot. "I'll see you when this is over," she promised, even if she looked mostly to John when she said it.
[TBC! NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Cowritten with the fantastic missed_the_gate, with most of the dialogue and one huge chunk taken from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon WIlliams. This totally got sped up cuz Pard told me to. *credits*]