[Dark Nest] - 3(96)

Zekk wanted it known that he was only responsible for the teeth grinding. Until he had become Jaina’s mindmate, he had never even heard most of the curse words that were now ricocheting around inside his head.

As they broke out of the clouds into the emerald vastness of Tenupe’s upper atmosphere, both exhaled in relief. A blinding torrent of energy was still crackling down around them, but now that they were above the rain and the clouds, the situation looked a little more like the battles they had grown accustomed to in space-with an emphasis on little. The megamaser beams were fanning down from about fifty points overhead. The vessels that fired them were still so distant that they were barely flecks against the sky, but they were descending fast, following each other down in a large open spiral and trailing long plumes of gray entry smoke that gave away their positions.

Jaina wrinkled her brow. A military fleet dropping out of orbit with batteries blazing might be terrible, but it was hardly something that Leia and Saba would expect Jaina and Zekk to stop with a pair of StealthXs. The warning had to point to something else-something the two Jedi Knights had not yet seen.

“Sneaky, give me a full tac on that fleet,” Jaina ordered. “I’m looking for something that doesn’t fit the attack profile.”

Sneaky tweedled an acknowledgment, then scrolled a message across the display: A SPACE FLEET PERFORMING CLOSE GROUND SUPPORT DOES NOT FIT ANY ATTACK PROFILE IN MY RECORDS.

“Your records don’t include the Battle of Bogo Rai,” Jaina said.

AND YOURS DO?

“ReyaTaat’s do,” Jaina said. ReyaTaat had once

been

a

Chiss intelligence officer named Daer’ey’ath. “It’s a famous Chiss battle. The Colony learned about it when Taat found Daer’ey’ath spying on us and received her into the nest.”

OH.

The fleet deployment appeared on Jaina’s tactical display. The enemy’s ground-support task force consisted of thirty Star Destroyers and their escorts, a truly awesome flotilla capable of incinerating the jungle from canopy to roots for kilometers around. But the Chiss were being oddly careless, leaving only a handful of Star Destroyers and their escorts in orbit to provide top cover. When UnuThul arrived with the Moon Swarm, he was going to do more than bloody the enemy fleet and drive it off-he was going to smash it against Tenupe.

The Chiss have made their last mistake, Zekk said through their mind-link. After UnuThul destroys their fleet, they will not be able to press the war.

The Chiss will be weakened, Jaina agreed. Somewhere deep in her mind, she knew that the total destruction of the fleet was a two-edged sword, that weakening the Chiss too much would only embolden the Colony and prolong the war-but it did not seem that way to UnuThul. She could sense his excitement through the Force. It was a dark momentum inside her, growing more powerful each moment and carrying her inexorably into bloody total war. The tide will change, and the Colony will crush them like bugs.

Zekk chuckled at the insult, and the sensation of his amusement made Jaina feel a little sad. There had been a time when the chuckle would have erupted from her lips, too, and neither of them would have known-or cared-who laughed first.

Then Jaina sensed something else from Zekk-a sudden surge of alarm-and they quickly dropped back into the clouds where they would be difficult to see. Four squadrons of clawcraft had started to descend ahead of the main task force, escorting a pair of Chiss defoliators and swinging wide to avoid the megamaser barrage.

Jaina and Zekk reached out to the defoliators in the Force and suddenly felt sick and cold. Those ships were what Leia and Saba had wanted them to intercept. There was something terrible aboard those two defoliators, something so sinister and deadly that it had overwhelmed their danger sense from nearly a hundred kilometers away.

Navigating by instruments, they swung onto an interception vector, and shortly afterward they escaped the barrage area. UnuThul soon felt the threat, too. A dark pressure arose inside their chests, pushing them after the two defoliators, compelling them to attack now. It was all they could do to resist his Will, to remain in the clouds until they were actually in a position to succeed.

Finally, when the two defoliators had moved so close that the main fleet would not risk firing into the fight, Jaina and Zekk raced forward. They remained in the clouds until they were directly beneath their targets, then pulled back their sticks and climbed straight up. Jaina armed a pair of proton torpedoes-the Colony could no longer acquire the baradium needed to make shadow bombs-then designated the defoliator on the right.

“We’ll take that one, Sneaky. Let me know when we have a target-lock.”

The droid chirped an acknowledgment, and for a moment it looked like their StealthXs might reach attack range unseen.