Halfway around, Jaina broke the loop with a snap roll, then kicked her into a fishtail and a barrel roll, bringing her about to nearly their original course, but with the initial four behind them. Now she did kick in both ion drives, as if to use sheer speed to split the gap between the two incoming fighters.
Both angled out suddenly, then turned back in, widening that escape route but giving them a longer shooting angle at the shuttle, and an easier turn to pursue.
“They’re good,” Mara warned, but, like Leia, she found her words lost in her throat, as Jaina, teeth gritted to fight back the g’s, reversed throttle.
“Princess—” The plaintive cry from the corridor ended abruptly in a loud crash.
“Coming in hot!” Mara cried, noting the fighter fast approaching to port.
Jaina didn’t, couldn’t even hear her; she had turned inward now, was feeling the Force coursing through her, was registering every movement of her enemies and reacting instinctively, playing the game three moves ahead. Before Mara had even begun to speak, Jaina had hit the forward attitude adjustment jets, lifting the nose, then she pumped the throttle and kicked the rudder, lifting the Jade Sabre and bringing her nose about to starboard, to directly face the other incoming Headhunter.
And that eager Rodian did come in at them, and hard, and the Jade Sabre’s defensive array screeched and lit up, warning of a lock-on.
“Jaina!” Leia cried.
“He’s got us!” Mara added.
But then the closer ship, coming from port, passed right under the Jade Sabre, and Jaina fired the repulsorlifts, bouncing the Jade Sabre up and sending the poor Headhunter into a wild, spinning roll.
The closing ship from starboard let fly its concussion missile, but it, and the Headhunter, zipped right underneath the elevated Jade Sabre.
Before the three women could even begin to catch their breath, another ship streaked in, an X-wing, the new XJ version of the starfighter, its own laser cannons blasting away from its wingtips. Not at the Jade Sabre, though, but at the Headhunter that had just gone past.
“Who is that?” Leia asked, and Jaina, equally curious, brought the Jade Sabre about hard.
The Headhunter snap-rolled left and dived, but the far superior X-wing stayed on her, lasers scoring hit after hit, depleting her shields and then blasting her apart into a million pieces.
“A Jedi,” Mara and Jaina said together, and Leia, when she paused to collect the Force sensations about her, concurred.
“Fast to the Mediator,” Leia instructed her daughter, and Jaina swung the Jade Sabre about yet again.
“I didn’t know there were any Jedi in the sector,” Leia said to Mara, who could only shrug, equally at a loss.
“Another one’s out,” Jaina informed them, watching the blips on her sensor screen. “And two others are vectoring away.”
“They want no part of a Jedi showing a willingness to shoot back,” Mara remarked.
“Maybe Rodians are smarter than I thought,” Leia said dryly. “Smooth it out,” she instructed her daughter, unbuckling and climbing unsteadily to her feet.
Jaina reluctantly dialed the inertial compensator back to full.
“Only one pursuing,” Jaina informed them as Leia made her way to the door.
“The X-wing,” Mara added, and Leia nodded.
In the hallway outside the bridge, Leia found C-3PO inverted and against the wall, his feet sticking up in the air, his head crunched forward so that his chin was tight against his chest.
“You have to learn to hold on,” Leia said to him, helping him upright. She glanced across the way to Bolpuhr as she spoke, to find the Noghri still standing calmly in the exact spot she had assigned him.
Somehow, she wasn’t amazed.
Jaina took the Jade Sabre at a swift but steady pace toward the distant Mediator. She checked often for pursuit, but it quickly became obvious that the Rodians in their outdated Headhunters wanted no part of this fight.
Leia rejoined them a short while later, to find Jaina in complete control and Mara resting back in her seat, eyes closed. Even when Jaina asked her aunt a question about docking procedures, the woman didn’t respond, didn’t even open her eyes.
“They’ll guide you in,” Leia interjected, and sure enough, a voice from the Mediator crackled over the opened comm, giving explicit directions for entry vector.
Jaina took her in, and Jaina took her down, easily—and after the display of flying she had just given them out with the Headhunters, Leia wasn’t the least bit surprised by her ability to so smoothly tight-dock a ship as large as the Jade Sabre.
That final shudder as Jaina eased off the repulsorlifts and settled the shuttle onto the docking bay floor stirred Mara from her rest. She opened her eyes and, seeing where they were, rose quickly.
And then she swayed and seemed as if she would fall.
Leia and Jaina were there in an instant, catching and steadying her.
She regained her balance and took a deep breath. “Maybe next time you can dial down the inertial compensator to ninety-seven instead of ninety-five,” she said jokingly, straining a smile.
Jaina laughed, but Leia’s face showed her deep concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Mara eyed her directly.
“Perhaps we should find a place where you can rest,” Leia said.
“Where we all can rest,” Mara corrected, and her tone told Leia to back off, a reminder that Leia was intruding on a private place for Mara, a place she had explicitly instructed all of her friends, even her husband, not to go. This disease was Mara’s fight alone, to Mara’s thinking, a battle that had forced her to reconsider everything she thought about her life, past, present, and future, and everything she thought about death.
Leia held her stare for a moment longer, but replaced her own concerned expression with one of acceptance. Mara did not want to be coddled or cuddled. She was determined to live on in an existence that did not name her disease as the most pressing and important facet of her entire life, to live on as she had before, with the illness being relegated to the position of nuisance, and nothing more.
Of course, Leia understood it to be much more than that, an internal churning that required Mara to spend hours and tremendous Force energy merely holding it in check. But that was Mara’s business.
“I hope to meet with Nom Anor tomorrow,” Leia explained, as the three, with C-3PO and Bolpuhr in tow, headed for the lower hatch, then moved down to the landing bay. A contingent of New Republic Honor Guard stood waiting there, along with Commander Ackdool, a Mon Calamarian with large, probing eyes, a fishlike face, and salmon-colored skin. “By all reports, we should all be rested before dealing with him.”
“Believe those reports,” Mara said.
“And first, it seems I get to meet with our savior Jedi,” Leia added dryly, looking back behind the Jade Sabre to see the X-wing gliding in to rest.
“Wurth Skidder,” Jaina remarked, recognizing the markings under the canopy on the starfighter.
“Why am I not surprised?” Leia asked, and she blew a sigh.
Ackdool came over to them, then, and extended his formal greetings to the distinguished guests, but Leia’s reaction set him back on his heels—indeed, it raised more than a few eyebrows among the members of the Mediator’s Honor Guard.
“Why did you send him out?” Leia snapped, motioning toward the docking X-wing.
Commander Ackdool started to answer, but Leia continued. “If we had needed assistance, we would have called for it.”
“Of course, Princess Leia,” Commander Ackdool said with a polite bow.
“They why send him out?”
“Why do you assume that Wurth Skidder flew out at my command?” the cool Commander Ackdool dared to respond. “Why would you assume that Wurth Skidder heeds any order I might give?”
“Couple o’ ridge-head parachutes floating over Osarian, if those Rodians had any luck,” came the singsong voice of Wurth Skidder. The cocky young man was fast approaching, pulling off his helmet and giving his shock of blond hair a tousle as he walked.
Leia stepped out to intercept him and took another quick step for no better reason than to make the Jedi stop short. “Wurth Skidder,” she said.
“Princess,” the man replied with a bow.
“Did you have a little fun out there?”
“More than a little,” the Jedi said with a wide grin and a sniffle—and he always seemed to be sniffling, and his hair always looked as if he had just walked in from a Tatooine sandstorm. “Fun for me, I mean, and not for the Rodians.”
“And the cost of your fun?” Leia asked.
That took the smile from Wurth Skidder’s face, and he looked at Leia curiously, obviously not understanding.
“The cost,” Leia explained. “What did your little excursion cost?”
“A couple of proton torpedos,” Wurth replied with a shrug. “A little fuel.”
“And a year of diplomatic missions to calm down the Osarians,” Leia retorted.
“But they shot first,” Wurth protested.
“Do you even understand that your stupidity likely escalated an already impossible situation?” Leia’s voice was as firm and cold as anyone present had ever heard it. So cold, in fact, that the always overprotective Bolpuhr, fearing trouble, glided closer to her, hanging back just behind her left shoulder, within fast striking distance of the Jedi.