Timothy Zahn - Outbound Flight

“What do we do?” Lorana asked, a sudden trembling in her voice. “We can’t just slaughter them.”

“Courage, Jedi Jinzler,” C’baoth said. “We’ll simply shoot between the hostages.”

“Impossible,” Ma’Ning insisted. “Not even with Jedi gunners. Turbolasers simply aren’t accurate enough.”

“Do you assume me to be a fool, Master Ma’Ning?”

C’baoth demanded scathingly. “Of course we won’t fire until we’re close enough for the necessary accuracy.”

“And meanwhile we just sit here and take their fire?”

Ma’Ning countered.

“Hardly,” C’baoth said, an edge of malicious anticipation creeping into his voice. “The Vagaari have a surprise in store for them. All Jedi: prepare to meld. Stretch out to the Force… and then, to the Vagaari.”

“They make no answer,” the Miskara said accusingly, as if Outbound Flight’s silence was Car’das’s fault.

“Perhaps they’re still consulting among themselves, Your Eminence,” Car’das suggested, shifting his eyes back and firth across the sky. The Vagaari ships had started to close the gap between themselves and Outbound Flight, moving together into groups of tight-formation clusters that would provide them the protection of overlapping forward shields.

They were preparing to attack.

And still nothing from Outbound Flight. Or from Thrawn, for that matter. His ships had to be around here somewhere. But where?

“You will give them a new message,” the Miskara ordered. “ ‘The time for discussion is ended. You will surrender now or—’ ”

And in the middle of the sentence, his voice abruptly dissolved into a confused burbling.

Car’das frowned, pressing the comlink to his ear. The whole bridge seemed to have collapsed into the same helpless babbling, as if the entire crew had had a mass mental attack.

Which was, he suspected, exactly what had happened.

He looked out again at Outbound Flight, an unpleasant shiver running through him. He’d heard the stories about all the ways Jedi could use their mind control tricks to confuse attackers, everything from creating false noises in their ears to making them unable to properly focus on controls or weapons systems. But while the stories also claimed that a group of them together could use that power on this massive a scale, he’d never heard of something like that actually happening.

Until now.

And with that, he knew, it was all over. The final card had come up double-down-nine, and the rest was as fixed and inevitable as a planetary orbit.

With the comlink still pressed to his ear, he settled down to wait for the end.

“So your tales were correct,” Mitth’raw’nuruodo murmured. “Your Jedi have reached across the distance to the Vagaari and numbed or destroyed their minds.”

“So it would seem,” Doriana agreed, feeling a little numb himself. Even if it was just the Vagaari commanders and gunners who’d been affected, and even given the fact that the aliens would have had no forewarning of what was coming, it was still a terrifying feat.

And it was being performed by a relative handful of Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights.

Predictably, it was Kav who broke the awed silence first. “And our part is to sit by and do nothing?” he prompted.

“Our part is to do that for which we have come,”

Mitth’raw’nuruodo said. Reaching to his board, he keyed a switch. “It is time for the Vagaari to die.”

“The Vagaari?” Kav echoed. “No! You were given my starfighters for use against Outbound Flight.”

“I was not given the starfighters at all,”

Mitth’raw’nuruodo corrected him coolly. Ahead, the droid starfighters were rising in waves now from their asteroid staging area, heading at full speed toward the clusters of Vagaari warships. “I will choose how to use them.”

Kav snarled something in his own language. “You will not get away with this,” he bit out.

“Walk cautiously, Vicelord,” Mitth’raw’nuruodo warned, his glowing eyes flashing at the Neimoidian. “Don’t forget that the starfighters aren’t the only Neimoidian technology I’ve taken from you.”

Doriana felt a sudden tingling on the back of his neck.

He spun around, expecting to find the two droidekas Mitth’raw’nuruodo had taken from the Darleveme standing behind them in full combat stance.

But there was nothing there. “No, Commander, the combat droids are not here,” Mitth’raw’nuruodo assured him.

“They’re where they can be of far more useful service.”

“And where is that?” Doriana asked.

“Where else?” Mitth’raw’nuruodo said, smiling tightly.

“On the bridge of the Vagaari flagship.”

The sudden multiple stutter of blasterfire in his ear sent Car’das twitching to the side, and he banged his elbow against the edge of the bubble as he hastily moved the comlink farther away. His head was still ringing as the rhythmic fire of the droidekas was joined by the more deliberate shots from the four battle droids’ rifles. Apparently, Thrawn had had a secondary control pattern laid in beneath the program Car’das had set up earlier for the Miskara. The sounds of shooting shifted subtly as the six droids began to move across the bridge, mowing down the helpless gunners and commanders.

And as they systematically chopped off the head of the Vagaari leadership hierarchy, the droid starfighters arrived.

The first and second waves flashed overhead without slowing, skimming the hull barely five meters from Car’das’s face as they drove toward the clusters of Vagaari ships in the distance. The third wave arrived in full combat mode, their laser cannons raking the flagship with a brilliant sheet of fire. Car’das flinched back, but almost before he had time to be frightened they, too, were past, leaving torn pieces of shattered hull material and white jets of escaping air in their wake. Blinking against the multiple purple afterimages, he peered through the dissipating gases at the other bubbles around him, half afraid of what he would see.

But the starfighters had pulled it off. In every single one of the bubbles within his view, the Geroon hostages were still alive—terrified, certainly, some of them clawing mindlessly at the plastic as if trying to tunnel their way out. But they were alive.

With Outbound Flight’s Jedi preventing the Vagaari gunners from defending their ships, and with the sharp-edged precision the droids’ electronic targeting systems and close-approachattack had permitted, the starfighters had sliced their way neatly through the warship’s hull between the Vagaari’s living shields.

And not just aboard the flagship. All around him, Car’das could see clouds of debris and escaping air enveloping the other nearby Vagaari warships, the haze scintillating with the fiery glow of the starfighters’ drives as they finished each set of targets and moved on to the next. Already in this first attack, he estimated Thrawn’s assault had taken out over a quarter of the alien warships.

And still with no response from the remainder. The question now, he knew, was whether the Jedi control of the aliens would last long enough for the starfighters to finish the job. Switching on his macrobinoculars, listening with half an ear to the one-sided carnage still going on beneath him on the bridge, he focused on Outbound Flight.

It was like nothing Lorana had ever felt before. Like nothing she had ever dreamed she would ever feel, or need to prepare herself for. Even as she submerged herself in the Jedi meld, allowing C’baoth to guide her and the others as they spread confusion across the Vagaari commanders and gunners, the alien minds she was wrapped around suddenly began exploding into death.

Not just a few deaths, either, small ripples of sensation that might have throbbed painfully but controllably against her consciousness. These deaths came in a thunderstorm torrent, wave after wave of fear and agony and rage that hammered against her already overstretched and vulnerable mind. She could feel herself staggering, her hands clutching blindly for something to hold on to as her body reacted to her disorientation. There was a sharp pain in her shoulder and head; distantly, she realized she had fallen out of her chair onto the deck. She could feel herself twitching uncontrollably; could sense the others’ reactions flowing through the meld, feeding into her weakness even as her own pain fed into theirs. A thousand alien voices shrieked through her brain as their life forces were snuffed out, with a thousand more waiting behind them…