Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Read Free Page A

Vong force was a wall of fire rushing toward them.
    Luke exerted himself, hurling himself backward with use of the Force, yanking Mara and Tahiri with him. They landed several meters back in the building corridor, still deflecting thrown thud bugs and razor bugs. Then the fiery flash from the explosion roared across the intervening Yuuzhan Vong and past the Jedi, momentarily blinding Luke, hammering him backward. Sure in his sense of where the other Jedi and Wraiths were, he whirled his lightsaber in a defensive motion he seldom used outside of practice, felt it hit something hard and unyielding.
    Then the heat and brightness were past. He found he was locked, lightsaber against amphistaff, with a warrior whose back was smoking. Three other warriors stoodamong him and his allies, though two were now dancing in concentrated fire from the Wraiths and Danni Quee. The last, in the middle of a quite elegant snap-kick against Mara, was receiving her lightsaber thrust up and under his skirt plates.
    Luke kicked out, catching his opponent in the center of the torso, sending him hurtling. The warrior staggered back to the walkway aperture … then dropped out of sight with a shout of surprise.
    The walkway was gone. Only smoke and the jagged edges where it had once joined the building suggested it had ever been there. Even with his ears ringing from the explosion, Luke could hear the smashing, grinding noise as its wreckage descended three or four hundred meters to the boulevard below.
    They stood panting for a moment, Jedi, Wraiths, and scientist, staring at one another. Finally Luke said, “Anyone hurt?”
    “I got grazed by a thud bug,” Danni said. “But it hit the armor. It only knocked me down.”
    “Something of a disastrous encounter,” Luke decided. “But at least we don’t have any injuries.”
    “It was a very successful encounter,” Face said. “Very promising.”
    Luke frowned. “How so? Now they know we’re here. That Jedi are here.”
    “No. First, I think they were all on the walkway. So no one alive knows that Jedi are here.”
    “Until they find the bodies,” Mara pointed out. “With distinctive lightsaber burns on them.”
    Face shrugged. “You have me on that one. But second, more important, until those lightsabers came out, they
believed we were Vong
. The disguises, and my extraordinary diligence in learning some conversational Yuuzan Vong during the last couple of years, are working. We can expect them to work again.”
    “Good point.”
    Face’s tone became professionally worried. “So, does that count as my turn, or do I have to check out the next walkway?”
    Luke grinned. “It counts as your turn.”
    “The next one,” Kell said, “will be twenty or thirty flights down. We’d better get to it.”
    Bhindi slapped the back of Kell’s helmet. “That one is going to have been hit by debris from
this
one, Explosion Boy. We go
up.
”
    His tone subdued, Kell said, “I knew that.”
Borleias, Pyria System
    Han Solo, upside down and up to his waist in machinery beneath the deck plating of the
Millennium Falcon
, heard and felt footsteps approaching. They were light, precise—Leia. That meant there would be a second set, the footsteps of Meewalh, Leia’s Noghri bodyguard, but Han had never actually heard them.
    A desire to finish patching the coupling he was working on kept him inverted and incurious—that, and the fact that he knew that if Leia had a problem, her walking pace wouldn’t be normal. “Artoo, you want to hand me the electrical flow meter?” He extended a hand up into the air.
    R2-D2, Luke’s astromech droid, responded with a series of cheerful whistles and bleats. Han heard the whine of a manipulator arm being extended, felt the meter being pressed into his hand. Then he heard his wife’s voice: “Do you think if I poked him, he’d bang his head into the flooring?”
    R2-D2’s blatted response sounded definitely affirmative.
    “You better hope she doesn’t,