[Dark Nest] - 3(114)

The assault shuttles were just beginning to fan out when one of them suddenly flew apart. There was no flash or fireball. The passenger cabin simply came apart at the seams, spilling its cargo of bugcrunchers out into the void.

As Luke was checking his tactical display to find the shuttle’s number, another one came apart.

He frowned and opened a channel to the pilots. “Stomper Twelve, what happened to your shuttle?”

The reply came in the electronic tones of a voice synthesizer, since Stomper Twelve’s pilot was currently floating through a vacuum and unable to produce any sounds with his own vocabulator. “It disintegrated.”

“I can see that!” Luke said. “What caused …”

Luke let the question trail off when he suddenly felt the Force drawing in around him, as though gathering itself for a powerful, violent release. He had just enough time to create a bubble of counterpressure around himself before every damage alarm on his control panel came to life. The cockpit simply came apart around him, and he found himself tumbling through space in the midst of a flotsam cloud.

Raynar Thul.

An electronic voice sounded inside Luke’s helmet. “Sir, if you were asking a question-“

“Disregard,” Luke ordered.

Another assault shuttle came apart, spilling another platoon of thirty-two bugcrunchers into space. This was not an attack Bwua’tu had expected-but that hardly mattered, because the Bothan always planned for what he could not foresee. He had been the one who had insisted that the Alliance specify space-assault YVHs as the platform when it purchased its new Bugcruncher Brigade.

Luke opened a brigadewide channel. “All dismounted Stomper units continue toward original target zones under individual propulsion.”

Again came the long string of acknowledgments. Luke used the Force to hitch a ride on a passing droid as his own platoon fired their thrusters and weaved through a blinding tangle of laser bolts, zipping starfighters, and rocket exhaust toward their target zone. They lost two units to lucky cannon strikes and three more to ramming dartships, but the Alliance starfighters were doing a good job of suppressing the enemy defenses, and Stomper One reached the Ackbar’s bridge in good order and with more than enough strength to perform their mission.

By then, much of the rest of the brigade had also reached the Star Destroyer and were dutifully reporting their successes as they breached the hull. The entire vessel had been declared a free-fire zone, so Luke really did not need to know more. He released the platoons to their own initiative and. told them to report when they had taken their objectives.

Luke reached out in the Force and found Raynar reaching back, descending rapidly from the command deck atop the bridge structure. Raynar’s presence was as murky and heavy as always, and as soon as Luke felt it, it began to press down inside, urging him to turn back.

Luke did not resist. He was going to leave, he wanted to leave … with Raynar. Luke began to exert his own will, pulling Raynar toward him, using Raynar’s own power against him by binding their presences together with memories from their past: of how Luke had once helped protect Raynar’s family from the Diversity Alliance, and how he had later helped Raynar’s father destroy a terrible virus that could have caused a galaxywide plague. They were going to leave together. UnuThul wished Luke to go, Luke wished UnuThul to go with him, and so they would go together. UnuThul wished it.

The weight inside suddenly diminished as Raynar started to retreat. Luke tried to stop him, to find some part of his former student that he could hold on to. But UnuThul still had the power of the Colony behind him, and he called on that power to break the bonds of remembrance the Jedi Master had so quickly woven. His murky presence wrenched free, and the heaviness vanished from inside Luke’s chest.

Stomper One and his assistant had already finished placing the breaching charges. The rest of the platoon was arrayed around Luke on the Ackbar’s hull, shielding him with their hulking bodies and firing their forearm-mounted blaster cannons at a flight of incoming dartships. Luke could see tiny divots forming in the droids’ laminanium body armor as the enemy’s weapons silently made their mark.

“What are you waiting for?” Luke commed Stomper One. “Detonate!”

But when it came to procedure, even war droids could not be hurried. “Stay clear!” Stomper One commed. “Fire in the hole!”

Then he detonated the charge.

Luke’s faceplate darkened against the brilliance of the blast, but not so completely that he missed the flash of Stomper One’s blaster cannons firing into the breached hull.

Then Stomper One pronounced, “Clear!” and began ordering, “Go … go … go …” at one-second intervals, sending a bugcruncher through the hole with each command.