Free Ylesia by Walter Jon Williams

state of my fighter, Vale may end up escorting
me
.”
    He heard snickers over the comm. Through the meld Jacen felt his sister bearing the humor with patience.
    â€œJust get her there, Twin Thirteen,” she said finally.
    â€œUnderstood,” Jacen said, and rolled his fighter so that he could spot Vale approaching from the planet below.

    â€œInertial compensators,” Thrackan said as he contemplated the wreck of his landspeeder. “What a
good
idea.”
    It had taken Thrackan and Dagga Marl longer to escape Peace City than he’d expected, largely because so many others were fleeing on foot and had gotten in the way. Barely had they emerged from Peace City’s ramshackle limits than a colossal spiraling chunk of yorik coral had come tumbling down out of the sky like a grayish green lump and impacted on the road just ahead of them.
    The explosion had thrown the landspeeder off the road and spinning into a patch of trees, where, between tree trunks and flying chunks of yorik coral, it had been comprehensively destroyed. But the deluxe landspeeder—built originally for a young Hutt, to judge by the fittings—had been equipped with inertial compensators, and these had failed only after the vehicle had come to a complete halt. Thrackan and Dagga emerged from the wreck unscathed.
    Thrackan turned to look at the shattered Yuuzhan Vong frigate lying in fragments beneath a thick cloud of smoke and dust.
    â€œI don’t think Maal Lah’s forces are doing very well,” Thrackan said. There was a horrific smell of burning organics, and he remembered that the frigate had actually been alive, that something akin to blood had pulsed through its hull.
    He turned to Dagga. “You wouldn’t have private means of getting us off the planet, do you?”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œOr knowledge of a landspeeder anywhere nearby?”
    Dagga shook her head. Thrackan shrugged.
    â€œThat’s all right. One will come along in a minute, stop to work out how to get around the wreckage—and then we’ll steal it.”
    Dagga flashed him her shark’s grin. “Boss, I like the way you think.”
    They crouched for some time in the trees by the road, but no landspeeder came. The explosion, with its cloud of smoke, had discouraged anyone from fleeing in this direction.
    Thrackan shrugged. “I guess we walk.”
    â€œWhere are we walking
to
?”
    â€œAway from the city that’s about to be pounded into gravel.” Thrackan began picking his way through the debris field. There was relatively little left to burn—most of the frigate had been
rock
—and the smoke was dissipating.
    He and Dagga fled back into the cover of the trees as a flight of fighter craft howled out of the sky and shrieked along the road toward Peace City. The fighters were distinctive, with ball cockpits and weird jagged pylons on either side. Thrackan was annoyed.
    â€œTIE fighters? We’re being attacked by the
Empire
now?” He glared. “I call this excessive!” He shook his finger at the sky. “I call this overkill on the part of Fate!”
    He waited a few minutes, then rose from his crouch among the bushes and scanned the sky carefully. “I guess they’re gone. But let’s stay in the trees and—“
    Dagga cocked an ear to the sky. “Listen, boss.”
    Thrackan listened, then ducked into the bushes again. “This is outrageous,” he muttered. “Haven’t these people anything better to do?”
    Another squadron of fighters—X-wings this time—blasted along the road, their wakes sending the last of the debris smoke swirling out to the sides in huge corkscrew whirls. Then out of the smoke came a phalanx of whining white landing craft that settled onto the huge scar created by the falling frigate. The last wisps of smoke were flattened by the repulsorlift fields as the landers neared the ground, and then