Ylesia by Walter Jon Williams Page B

into the beast and blew Jaina off the creature’s back. She tumbled free, calling the Force to cushion her landing on the duracrete. Even so the impact knocked the breath from her lungs, her teeth clacking together on impact. From the position on the ground she saw Lowie dragging wounded civilians from a wrecked landspeeder, other intact speeders milling amid a swarm of confused refugees and stunned prisoners, and the death agonies of the other quednak, which had finally succumbed to heavy weapon fire.
    Then the second beast, the one she’d ridden, took a cannon bolt to the head, and reared as it began to die. Jaina saw the slab-sided wall flank begin its fall, and she scuttled like a crab out of the way as the creature came down in a wave of stench and blood. An agonized thrash of its tail threw a pair of landspeeders against a wall, and then the giant reptoid was dead.
    Dead riding beasts now blocked the road at either end, trapping the column between rows of buildings. Overhead came a pair of swift flyers, swoop analogs, that dived over the street, plasma cannons stuttering. Jaina rolled away from fire and flying splinters as superheated plasma ripped the duracrete near her.
    The worst threat from the swoop analogs wasn’t their cannons, however. Each had a dovin basal propulsion unit in its nose, and these living singularities leapt out to snatch at the landspeeders’ shields, overloading them and causing them to fail in a flash of frustrated energy.
    Jaina rose to her feet, her head swimming with the magnitude of the disaster. There was nothing she could do against the aircraft without her X-wing, so she staggered across the duracrete to aid Lowbacca in helping injured civilians. With the Force she lifted rubble from a wounded Rodian.
    Concentrated fire from the soldiers blew one of the swoop analogs apart. The other, trailing fire, was deliberately crashed by its pilot into a landspeeder, and both craft were destroyed in an eruption of flame.
    It was than that Jaina heard the sudden ominous humming, and her nerves tingled to the danger as she swung to face the sound, her lightsaber on guard.
    A buzzing swarm of thud and razor bugs sped through the air, racing for their targets—and then Yuuzhan Vong warriors swarmed out of the office buildings on the south side of the street, while from either end of the street they came pouring like a wave over the bodies of the dead riding beasts. From five hundred throats came the chorused battle cry,
“Do-ro’ik vong pratte!”
    There were screams as scores went down before the flying wave of deadly insects. Jaina slapped a thud bug out of the sky with her lightsaber, and neatly skewered a razor bug that was making a run for Lowie’s head. The Yuuzhan Vong warriors slammed with an audible impact into the stunned, milling crowd in the street. The New Republic soldiers were so hampered by the swarms of noncombatants that they were barely able to fire in their own defense. The Yuuzhan Vong leapt right aboard the landspeeders that had suffered the loss of their shields, slashing through screaming civilians and prisoners in order to reach soldiers so tightly packed they couldn’t raise a weapon.
    Jaina parried away an amphistaff that was swung at her head, and let Lowie, thrusting over her shoulder, dispose of the warrior who wielded it. The next warrior went down before a pair of lightsabers, one swung high, one thrust low. Jaina readied a cut at a figure that lurched toward her, then realized it was one of Thrackan’s bodyguards in his preposterous fake armor. A shrieking human female, bloody from a razor bug slash and helpless with her hands cuffed, stumbled into Jaina’s arms, and died from the lunge of the snarling Yuuzhan Vong warrior who was willing to run her through in order to reach Jaina. Jaina shuffled away from the thrust in time, and then, before the warrior could clear his weapon from his victim, her point took him in the