Luke’s breath left him in a rush of fear. Not again. He could not tell Leia that he had lost another of her sons.
“Get him out!”
“I’m trying,” Mara commed. “Just calm down.”
But Luke could not calm down. He felt as though he had been punched in the stomach by a Wookiee. It was bad enough that he had sent Anakin to his death, but this time Jacen had been with him. He looked in the direction from which he sensed Mara’s presence.
It took a moment to pick out her blotchy red image through all the rubble displayed by the imaging system inside his visor. But she was already wearing her combat harness, and she had her bulky G-12 power blaster slung over one shoulder. The battered remains of her starfighter were bobbing along in the rubble beneath her, and she was hanging on to the empty droid socket behind the shattered canopy of Jacen’s StealthX.
Now that he saw that Mara was already with Jacen, Luke began to calm. What could be done, she was doing-but he did not understand how she had gotten there so fast. Before the explosion, she had been on the other side of him.
“How’d you get over there?”
“Bounced,” Mara said. She took the lightsaber off her utility belt. “You coming?”
“Be right there.”
Luke popped his canopy, then grabbed his own combat harness and slipped out of his darkened cockpit. He pulled the massive power blaster out of the carrying sleeve behind his seat, connected the powerfeed to the energy pack on his combat harness, and slung the weapon over his shoulder.
A trio of Jedi presences arrived behind him, about fifty meters away. Luke glanced back and saw three empty spaces about the size of StealthXs amid all the dust and spitcrete floating in the penetration crater. Even this close, the imaging system inside his helmet was as blind to the starfighters as any sensor system.
“Master Skywalker?” Kyle asked over the helmet corns.
“Jacen’s out-we don’t know how had.” Luke used the Force to pull R2-D2 out of the astromech socket and used a utility clip to attach the droid to the back of his combat harness. “We’ll need a hand evacuating . .”
Luke let the sentence trail off when an icy knot of danger sense formed between his shoulder blades. He dropped behind his StealthX and felt the fuselage vibrating beneath a hail of shatter gun pellets. He peered under the belly of wreckage, but his attackers were too well covered for his helmet’s imaging system to pick them out from the surrounding rubble.
Luke worked to quiet his mind, to sense only the Force holding him in its liquid grasp, lapping at him from all sides. He began to feel a mass of ripples coming at him from the emptiness ahead, from the shifting voids of beings hiding themselves in the Force. There were hundreds of them, Gorog warriors rushing to the attack, pouring into the battle zone through a choke point hidden somewhere deep in the sea of floating rubble.
And there was more, a stillness so fixed it was frozen, a cold hole that seemed to he drawing the Force into it.
“Lomi Plo is here,” Luke commed. At the same time, he was reaching into the battle-meld, calling Kyp and Corran and the rest of the Jedi to his side, letting them know it was time to close the trap. “She came after us.”
Shatter gun pellets began to stream through the fuselage on Luke’s side of the cockpit, and he knew that his protection was disintegrating fast. Still peering under the StealthX wreckage, he pulled the heavy power blaster off his back, then used the Force to send a speeder-sized block of spitcrete tumbling toward an even larger one where he had detected the nearest group of Gorog.
The two blocks collided in silence and tumbled away in new directions. The shatter gun fire stopped instantly, and images of warm bug gore and crushed pressure shells began to drift across Luke’s imaging system. He spotted a trio of Gorog tumbling through the rubble, all six limbs flailing as they struggled to bring their carapace suits back under control.
Luke swung the barrel of his power blaster around and fired one bolt at each insect, using the Force to steady himself against the blowback caused by the weapon’s massive energy discharges. Unlike the lighter blasters that Luke and Mara-and Han and Leia-had been carrying the first time they fought the Gorog, the big G-12s had more than enough power to punch through the thick chitin of a Killik pressure carapace. As each bolt struck, it literally shattered the protective shell-and the bug inside.
When no more shatter gun pellets came his way, Luke turned toward Mara. She was crouching on the other side of Jacen’s StealthX, trying to use her lightsaber to cut him out of the cockpit. She was not having much success. A small tangle of Gorog were floating toward her through the rubble, spraying Jacen’s crippled starfighter with shatter gun pellets as they bounced from block to block.