[Dark Nest] - 3(46)
Jaina made a scooping motion with her hand, using the Force to hurl a huge mass of soil at the cannons, driving the mud down the emitter nozzle and packing it tight around the galven coils. The weapons exploded an instant later, blowing off the turret and leaving a five-meter breach in the top hull.
The Killiks rattled forward in a boiling wave, the tiny Jooj swarming along the walls and ceiling, the mighty Rekkers springing directly onto the drop ship. The Rekkers boomed their thoraxes in glee and dived through the breach left by the destroyed turret. A few seconds after the first insects had entered, the drop ship’s hull began to reverberate with muffled sizzles and dull pings.
Jaina clicked her throat in approval, then reached out in the Force to see if she could sense Jagged Fel’s presence aboard the vessel. They were enemies now, but she did not want him to die. As a skilled tactician and a high-ranking Chiss officer, he would be a great asset to the Colony-assuming he could be captured and brought into a nest.
And if Jag became a Joiner, she mused, the Dawn Rumble would be so much more
“R u u buruub!” Wuluw burst out. The little Killik started to turn and flee back down the tunnel. “Bur!”
“No!” Jaina caught the insect by an arm. “This way.”
If the Chiss were arming the drop ship’s self-destruct mechanism, the last place they wanted to be when the shock waves hit was underground. Dragging Wuluw along, Jaina Force-leapt onto the drop ship’s hull, then sprang again, leaping half a dozen meters to the surface.
She found herself standing in the heart of the Chiss landing zone, a clearing of mud and ash surrounded by a circle of blast-toppled mogo trees. A hundred meters away, the landing zone abruptly gave way to a skeleton jungle, a leafless tangle of trunks and limbs stripped bare by Chiss defoliating sprays. In the distance, barely visible through the pouring rain and the naked timber, she could see the upended tail of another drop ship, rising out of a hole similar to the one from which she had emerged.
A flurry of shrill sizzles erupted as a Chiss squad opened up with their charric rifles. Wuluw tried to dive hack underground, but Jaina jerked her in the opposite direction.
“I told you, this way!” Jaina started across the clearing, dodging and weaving and dragging Wuluw along. “It’s safer!”
“Bur ub bbu!”
“Of course they’re shooting at us.” Jaina reached the edge of the clearing and dived for cover. “They’re the enemy!”
They landed between a pair of fallen mogo trees, and the sizzles became crackles as the charrics began to chew through the speeder-sized trunk.
“R-ruu u-u b-b-burp;” Wuluw stammered.
“Don’t worry.” Jaina unslung her repeating blaster. “We’re Jedi, aren’t we?”
Wuluw thrummed her thorax doubtfully.
Jaina popped up and began to pour bolts back across the clearing. The nearest drop ship-the one she had bounded up-had not yet self-destructed, and the Jooj were swarming up the hull and pouring out across the landing zone. The Rekkers were coming, too, springing out of the pit by the dozens, booming their thoraxes in glee and spraying shatter gun pellets in every direction.
But the Chiss were recovering from their shock and making their presence known. Nearly half the leaping Rekkers tumbled back into the hole, their thoraxes trailing arcs of gore or their heads vanishing in the flash of a maser beam. And many of those who did reach the jungle floor landed in pieces or limp, oozing heaps.
Jaina did her best to cover them, but the Chiss troops were camouflaged in color-shifting, fractal-pattern armor that made them nearly impossible to see. She reached out in the Force and felt perhaps a hundred enemy soldiers scattered throughout the area, all confused, frightened, and-typically for Chiss-still resolute. She began to rely on the Force rather than her eyes to find targets and saw a bolt strike what appeared to be a mogo limb-until it dropped its charric rifle and whirled away clutching a wounded shoulder.
Then a powerful jolt shook the ground. The nearest drop ship’s tail erupted into a ball of shrapnel and orange flame, and the Force shuddered with the anguish of a mass death. Jaina dropped back behind the tree and turned to pull Wuluw down beside her. She found only a shard of white-hot durasteel, lodged in a blood-sprayed mogo trunk behind where the Killik had been standing.
Jaina had seen-had caused-so much carnage in combat that she had believed herself numb to the storm of emotions it spawned. But the loss of the frightened little Wuluw brought it all back-all the fear and the anger and the guilt, the despair and the loneliness and the soul-scorching rage that had been lurking just beneath the surface since the deaths of Anakin and Chewbacca and so many others.