Part 16: Still in the Sky
"What the…" Sheng Lah's breath was knocked from him before he could finish his curse. He had thought he convinced every creature in the area to nap, but apparently, he had missed at least one. Within one standard minute, the apparent cousin of the voxyn had completely scrambled his Vongsense. He then remembered the strange encounter with the creature who blocked his senses on Zonama, but he was too late, for the energy used to meld Ben and Jysella had escaped Sheng Lah's control and slammed the Yuuzhan Vong hard against his seat. The ship, sensing the chaos in its pilot, jolted.
"Oh, no! Oh, Sith, no!" Sheng Lah's normally blue-gray face paled as he watched his out-of-control ship plummet toward the mixture of plant life and buildings that composed Coruscant.
-scene change-
"Hey Flames, you're up!" One of the pilots pointed out to Ben over the radio. Ben wanted to reach out with the Force and stop One's disabled starfighter from spiraling toward the planet, but the words of the pilot behind him stopped his hands.
"Don't worry, Holo-model, I'm picking up where she left off." Ben assured the boy behind him as he charged at the overgrown dovin basal and fed it a series of laser blasts.
"Looks like those women on that backwater planet have some pretty good stuff." Commented the leader of the Twi'lek pilots as she watched the futile attempts the dovin basal made at defending itself. A void began to suck the first few shots, but the weakened creature could not maintain its defense, and all but one beam lived to put a dent in the Yuuzhan Vong creature.
"Forgive me if I end up late." Ben muttered as he watched Crest go EV. The witches of the Dathomiri desert apparently supplied clothing in the form of Jedi cloaks, for a black robe wrapped itself around the pilot's clothing as she descended into the second level of Coruscant's medium-sized atmosphere. Only seconds later, a ship left the worldship that orbited Coruscant and dived after the sixteen-year-old girl's body.
The remaining pilots watched helplessly as one of their leaders was captured via the Yuuzhan Vong equivalent of a tractor beam. "Kriff you, Crest! Now I have to pick up Sil, Jysella, and you! You'd better stay in one piece."
"Oh, stang!" Ben muttered as he saw three skips converge upon his X-Wing. Just as he prepared to maneuver, a surge of energy slammed him in the chest. He reached out through the Force and realized that whatever linked his mind to Jysella's had been destroyed and the energy he had contributed to the meld was returning to its source. The Force-generated explosion jerked Ben's arms wildly, and Ben watched in horror as his X-Wing danced around as if its pilot was drunk. Ben's lessons in safety told him to release his grip on the controls of the starfighter, but instinct said otherwise. Shots were fired randomly from the weapons ports and a cloud of plasma inhibited Ben's vision like a fog. Ben Skywalker was, for the moment, the chaotic center of the impromptu battle.
When the red-haired Skywalker finally recovered from the hit of the Force, he counted two less skips and pieces of a scarred body, which were barely visible against the blackness of space, floating in front of the X-Wing. Ben shuddered to think about the Yuuzhan Vong's death by depressurization.
"Wow, Flames, you really lived up to that name!" One of the amazed pilots commented over the radio. By some pure, Jedi luck, Ben had evaded all plasma bolts and blown two skips out of the sky in his crazed madness. Ben's grip on the controls tightened when he heard traces of communication over the comm, for it meant that some Alliance ship was approaching.
-scene change-
Jysella wanted to scream when the backlash from the destruction of the meld slammed her into the cell's coral walls, but her logic, or what remained of it for the moment, drove her to draw every scream into herself. The Shamed Ones she had organized would come, and Valin, or anyone other Force user, did not need trouble with his commander for charging into the system spontaneous on 'some delusional claim about a dead Jedi'.
The energy of the Force-wave became increasingly difficult to control and the Jedi Knight channeled it at a random spot on the living floor. Before the drained woman could see the results of her blast, she collapsed against the wall and blacked out.