Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Read Online Free PDF Page A

could look again. The creature was down on its side, its belly ripped and blackened by the force of the explosion. Blood streamed from it, but amazingly, it still lived, at least for the moment, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe.
    It was not firing on X-wings or the troop transport now. Lando could hear and see the transport’s lasers picking up again, not concentrating their fire on the creature, now picking off individual Yuuzhan Vong warriors within sight.
    Lando’s droid was firing, too. Lando looked over to see the droid placing shot after shot into the body of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior who’d come so close to killing him. The warrior was dead, the neck and top torso portions of his armor burned away by repeated blasts.
    “One-One-A, you can stop now,” Lando said. “What’s wrong? Is your threat-recognition software on the blink?”
    The droid looked at him. “Yes, sir. I suspect so, sir. I still register this one as a threat.”
    “Override control twenty-seven aye aye six, flag this target as no threat.”
    “Understood, sir.” The droid stopped firing.
    “We’ll get you in for repairs,” Lando said. “But don’t feel bad. You did well.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The situation was largely under control by the time Wedge descended to the planet’s surface in his shuttle. He made a pass over the site of the Borleias New Republic base.
    Once upon a time, it had been an Imperial base, housing TIE fighters and stormtroopers, charged with the duty of defending a nearby biological research facility managed by the Imperial general Evir Derricote. Then Rogue Squadron, at the time commanded by Wedge himself, had come as the spearhead of a mission that had wrested control of the world from Derricote. The Imperial base had become a Rebel Alliance base, and then, once the Rebels had taken Coruscant and become the legitimate government in this part of the galaxy, a New Republic base.
    Now it was rubble. Wedge doubted that any part of the original base was more than two meters in size. Where the main facilities buildings had once been nowrested another sort of building, pastel red and pearl, several stories in height, a circular core from which eight more or less evenly spaced extensions radiated, like arms on a sea creature. Wedge didn’t have to ask to know that the building was something organic, a living creature bred by the Yuuzhan Vong to serve as a dwelling. Had it been dropped on the former base like a bomb, crushing it flat, or had it grown out of the middle? Wedge didn’t know.
    Lying beside it was a gargantuan creature, another of the Yuuzhan Vong’s fighting resources, the reptile the
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had reported. It lay on its side in an immense pool of black blood. Wedge’s troops reported that it was dead and awarded the kill to Lando Calrissian and the group of engineers.
    The main building was surrounded by numerous smaller buildings, these shaped like the curved shells found on the backs of oceangoing arthropods and some land-based snails. Each was the size of a small house, aesthetically pleasing in muted color and curving design—so long as one didn’t remember that they housed beings who killed other sapient beings without mercy and injured themselves for pleasure.
    The rest of the old base was in ruins, docking bays and outbuildings turned into blackened, crumbling shells. It looked to Wedge as though they’d been used for target practice by the coralskippers’ plasma cannons.
    The area was swarming with New Republic troops. Dead men and women in New Republic uniforms lay at various points on the ground; there were many dead Yuuzhan Vong among them. Wedge saw his troops leading prisoners into open patches of ground surrounded by other troops. Many of the prisoners were human, their foreheads, even at this distance, clearly bearing the coral-like twin horn growths that signaled they were slaves ofthe Yuuzhan Vong. Other prisoners were Yuuzhan Vong, but their skins were smooth, unadorned