Conquest: Edge of Victory I by Greg Keyes Read Free Book Online

at times. Maybe he ought to do something about that.
    Two laser blasts hit his shields in quick succession, but they did their job. On his tracker, the proton torpedoes continued to close as Anakin met resistance from the atmosphere. He plunged on, and the ship began to vibrate faintly. His nose and wings were starting to heat up from the upper atmosphere. If he didn’t time this exactly right, he would scatter all over the jungle kilometers below.
    When the lead torp was almost on him, he cut his engines and yanked the nose up. The atmosphere, still thin, was nevertheless able to give the XJ X-wing a good strong slap, hurling him away from the moon. Servos whined and something somewhere made a startling
ping
. Using the momentum from the atmospheric skip, Anakin turned further spaceward, blood rushing from his head as the g’s mounted, then he kicked in the engines again.
    Behind him, the proton torpedoes didn’t fare as well. They tried to turn after him, of course. Two didn’t make it, and continued plunging moonward. The other two skipped along wildly different courses than Anakin and would never find him again before running out of fuel.
    “Nice try,” Anakin said grimly. Now he was climbing uphill, out of the gravity well, his lasers pumping a steady rhythm. He took another hit from the enemy’s more powerful gun, and for an instant the lights dimmed in the cockpit. Then they flared back to life as Fiver rerouted, and Anakin took a hammer to the transport. Their shields faltered, and he slagged their primary generator. Looping around them nose to tail, he drilled laser turrets, torpedo ports, and engines.
    Then he tried the comm again. “Ready to talk now?” he asked.
    “Why not?” the voice from the other end replied. “You can still surrender if you want.”
    “That’s—” Anakin began, but Fiver interrupted.
    HYPERSPACE JUMP DETECTED . 12 VESSELS HAVE ARRIVED, DISTANCE 100,000 KILOMETERS .
    “Sith spit!” Anakin muttered, bringing his sensors to bear.
    They weren’t Yuuzhan Vong ships, he saw that immediately, just a motley collection of E-wings, transports, and corvettes.
    They were hailing him. He opened the link.
    “Unidentified vessel, this is the Peace Brigade,” a voicecrackled. “Stand down and surrender, and you won’t be harmed.”
    They were too far away to hit him. Soon they wouldn’t be. Anakin closed his S-foils, rolled, opened the throttle, and raced toward the distant viridian of Yavin 4.
       Anakin vaulted from the cockpit of the X-wing into silent near darkness. A twilight line of illumination in the distance was the entrance he had flown through into what had once been a part of an ancient Massassi temple complex, much later the central hangar for the Rebel fleet, and which now saw little use at all, since most ships landing at the academy set down outside.
    Anakin’s flight boots scuffed the ancient stone surface, and the sound grew around him into the hushed beating of enormous wings. He smelled stone and lubricant and more faintly the musky jungle outside.
    Someone was watching Anakin from the darkness.
    “Who is that?” a voice asked, each word stretching to fill the abyss.
    “It’s me, Kam. Anakin.”
    A faint glow appeared, and then a bank of light panels came on. Some ten meters away Kam Solusar stood, hooking his lightsaber back into his belt.
    “I thought it felt like you,” Kam said. “But there’s been an unknown ship in orbit for several standard days now. We’ve been trying to keep them confused.”
    “Peace Brigade,” Anakin explained. “And the one ship has friends now, about twelve of them. And they aren’t confused anymore.”
    He’d been walking toward Kam while he spoke, and suddenly his old teacher swept forward, clasping his arm. “It’s good to see you, Anakin. And you? You’re alone?”
    Anakin nodded. “Talon Karrde is on the way with a flotilla. He’s supposed to evacuate you and the students. Uncle Luke wasn’t expecting the