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

that the building’s generator had been smashed. Currently a small freighter was situated next to the building, heavy cables running from its engine compartment into the building’s basement and to field shield units set up to protect the complex.
    The building was now surrounded by six square kilometers of destroyed jungle growth. His forces had used fire, lasers, defoliants, whatever they could get their hands on. The biotics facility, a secret home of ugliness, was surrounded by obvious ugliness. To step out of the building was to step into a hot, humid environment that stank of burned vegetation and offered no view but char, ships that had landed for repairs, and distant jungle.
    Luke, returning from a perimeter sweep around the Yuuzhan Vong settlement—a sweep in which they’d encountered no Yuuzhan Vong, but suspected, from the behavior of Borleias’s animal life, that Vong were out there—learned that Wedge had requested his presence at a general meeting of his senior officers and personal allies. He joined the crowd in the biotics building’s ground-floor mess hall. Mara was already there, baby Ben in her arms; at her feet was a baby carrier she’d jury-rigged from a backpack. On one ankle was a cast, immobilizingit against the bone break she’d sustained when she crash-landed during Coruscant’s fall.
    Luke headed for a seat beside her, but Wedge waved him up to the head of the table, to the other seat beside him. Luke gave Mara a smile of apology and moved to sit by Wedge.
    “Our stay here is going to be short,” Wedge said to the entire assembly. “But it’s going to be longer than we’d like. There’s going to be more fighting. I’d like to have some tricks up our sleeves to offer the Yuuzhan Vong when they come, so I want you to be thinking about it. Transmit your ideas to your commanding officers. The commanding officers will transmit them to me—and I don’t want there to be too much editing of them. Now’s not the time to think conservatively.”
    A naval officer Luke did not know, a woman in a lieutenant’s uniform, spoke up. “General, if I can ask—”
    “Go ahead,” Wedge said.
    “Why do we want to stay here at all? The garrison has to have alerted their commanders that they were being overrun. The Yuuzhan Vong will be coming.”
    Wedge nodded. “Well, there are several reasons. The first is this: because Borleias—rather, the Pyria solar system—is an important hyperspace crossroads, the convenient intersection of a lot of routes, it’s on a lot of people’s nav computers. It’s inevitable that many refugees fleeing Coruscant—or arriving there and suddenly discovering that the Yuuzhan Vong have taken it—will be coming here as the first stage of their escapes. Someone needs to help them. A lot of them may be in damaged craft. We can’t have them clogging up our repair facilities in space, not when they’re needed to repair combat craft, so they’ll have to put down on the planet’s surface.
    “Second, we need to catch our collective breaths. We left Coruscant with just the ships on our backs. We needto take stock, take inventory … and calculate the enormity of the disaster that we’ve just experienced.” Wedge’s face, for a moment, expressed a pang of pain, and Luke felt it, too. Wedge hadn’t been able to get in touch with his wife, Iella, or daughters, Syal and Myri, before duty had forced him to leave Coruscant. Not knowing what had happened to them, the shame of not being able to carry out both his duties to the New Republic and his duties to his family, had to be eating at him. Wedge swallowed hard, then his features were schooled once again into impassivity, and he continued.
    “Third, yes, the Yuuzhan Vong will be coming here. They can’t permit an enemy garrison so close to the planet they’ve just taken. And if we can hold their attention for a while, that’s even more time for others fleeing Coruscant to get away, and for our other fleet