“You’ll forgive me if I want to know how,” Omas said.
“Simple.” It was Jacen who said this. “We take out Raynar Thul.”
Pellaeon and Omas exchanged uneasy glances, then Omas asked, “By ‘take out,’ you mean-“
“We mean do whatever is necessary to remove him from power,” Luke said. He was still not ready to commit to killing one of his own Jedi Knights-at least not publicly. “But to destroy the Colony, we can’t stop there. I’ll have to find and kill Lomi Plo.”
Pellaeon’s eyes narrowed. “And you can do that? I thought she was invisible.”
“She won’t be invisible this time,” Luke said. “And we have a backup plan.”
“We do?” Han asked, raising his brow.
Luke nodded. “Something Cilghal developed while you and Leia were scouting Lizil.”
Luke avoided any reference to the mission being unauthorized. Despite Leia’s misgivings about him assuming sole leadership of the Jedi, she was obviously still dedicated to the Alliance and the order-she had proved that when she and Han returned to sound the warning about the coups instead of continuing after Jaina and Zekk.
When Luke did not elaborate, Pellaeon grew
impatient.
“Master Skywalker, you obviously have a plan to end this entire crisis. Would you please stop wasting the Chief’s time and tell us?”
Luke smiled. “Of course.”
He laid out the basics of the plan that he and Mara had been developing for some time, outlining what he would need from the Defense Forces, how the Alliance’s Jedi would be used, and what they would need from Chief Omas. By the time he finished, there had been a clear shift in the mood on the command platform.
“Just so I’m sure I understand,” Omas said. “This will destroy the Colony, but not the Killiks?”
“That’s right,” Luke said. “And even if the Colony does somehow form again, it won’t be able to expand.”
Omas nodded, then caught Luke’s eye and held it. “And you really said ‘the Alliance’s Jedi’?”
Luke laughed, trying to keep hidden the sense of loss he felt inside. “I did,” he said. “The Jedi serve the Force-but we can’t serve it in a vacuum. We need the Galactic Alliance as much as it needs us.”
“Well, then!” Omas’s face brightened, and he turned to Pellaeon. “What do you think of our Jedi’s plan?”
Pellaeon grew thoughtful, absentmindedly twisting the ends of his mustache, then frowned in approval. “It’s sneaky,” he said. “I like it.”
FOURTEEN
A terrible ripping noise growled down out of the clouds, and Jaina looked up to see another flight of Chiss missiles arcing through the downpour. It had been days-more than a week-since the Great Swarm had boiled out of the ground beneath the enemy’s drop ships, and the missiles had not stopped. They came day and night, painting streaks of white fire across the sky and trailing green plumes of insecticide, grating nerves raw with their endless growling.
Jaina made a sweeping motion with her hand, using the Force to hurl three missiles hack toward their launchers. The other two dropped into the defoliated jungle behind her and detonated in a blinding pulse, hurling trunks in every direction and flashing killer radiation through the naked trees for a hundred meters.
Killiks died by the hundreds in an instant, and they would die by the thousands as the plumes of poisonous vapor settled to the jungle floor and began to take their toll. It did not matter. UnuThul was urging the Great Swarm onward, filling every thorax with the same irresistible compulsion to attack, attack, attack that Jaina felt hammering inside her own chest. The Killiks had to overrun the Chiss lines; they had to do it now.
There was just one problem.
Already, the jungle floor lay buried so deeply beneath dead Killiks and pieces of dead Killiks that Jaina could barely walk. In places, she was literally wading through pools of insect gore or scrambling over mounds of broken chitin, and the enemy lines remained as unattainable as ever. For every hundred meters the Great Swarm advanced, the Chiss pulled back a hundred and one. Eventually, of course, they would run out of room to retreat-but Jaina was beginning to worry that the Colony would run out of Killiks first.
Jaina slipped behind the trunk of a giant mogo and dropped to her knees, keeping one eye on the flickering battle ahead as she uncapped her canteen. The problem was not that the Killiks were failing to kill the enemy. Jaina could see half a dozen panicked Chiss ripping at their armor to get at the Jooj underneath, and every few moments, a Rekker would spring over a breastwork and send a Chiss soldier bouncing off the trees-often in pieces.