Jedi Trial Read Online Free Page B

target, which also disappeared in a ball of flame.
    “Your six!” Pleth warned suddenly. High-energy bolts lanced past Erk’s cockpit from astern. Either some fighters had broken away from the defensive circle, or another flight had come up to join the first. Erk instantly went into an inverted roll, pulled hard into a vertical dive, and pulled out in the opposite direction from his attackers. He climbed back up and took them from astern. Both exploded.
    “Too many of them!” Pleth shouted.
    “Copy that,” Erk replied calmly.
    “… break … Waterboy …”
    “Say again, Waterboy,” Erk said in response to the garbled call from the controller aircraft. He switchedto the guard channel. “Waterboy, say again your last transmission on guard.” He knew someone on the ship would be monitoring the guard channel.
    “… going in,” a female voice replied calmly, and then there was nothing but static.
    Erk switched back to the scrambled frequency. “Head for home, Pleth. Waterboy is down, repeat, Waterboy is down.”
    Since they were only 150 kilometers from base, Erk descended to within meters of the surface, where the enemy craft would have difficulty tracking them against the ground clutter, and gave his engines power. They would be back at base in less than sixty seconds, muster the rest of the squadron, and return to do permanent damage to the invaders’ fighter screen and the landing party. At last, something was happening on Praesitlyn!
    Erk had accounted for ten of the enemy fighters in a dogfight that lasted only one minute from beginning to end, an impressive score for any pilot. But Lieutenant H’Arman was bold when he had to be and cautious when caution was called for, and now caution was being called for loud and clear. It was time to head back to the farm, rearm, and return in force. He had been so involved in the dogfight, however, that he’d had no time to gather useful intelligence on the strength of the enemy force or its intentions.
    “Bad luck about Waterboy,” Pleth said. They were both thinking of that young ensign.
    Yeah
, Erk thought,
very bad luck
.
    *    *    *
    Skill, not luck, had brought Odie Subu and her speeder bike undetected to a spot just behind the crest of a ridge where she could observe the enemy landing force deploying on the plain below. She was a member of a reconnaissance platoon General Khamar had spread out before his army to develop intelligence about the enemy landing force. The orbital surveillance system had been destroyed or was being electronically jammed, and the recon drones the defense force had sent out earlier had failed to report. Even communications with the army’s main force were being successfully jammed—only short-range, line-of-sight transmissions via tactical communications nets were possible. So General Khamar was forced to rely exclusively on his living recon detachments.
    Odie lay prone beside her speeder, just below the military crest of the ridge. She lifted her faceplate to wipe perspiration from her forehead. Her face was burned a dark red from constant exposure to wind, sun, and sand, but the area around her eyes, protected from the elements by the faceplate, had remained perfectly white. She ran the tip of her tongue over her parched lips. Water? No, no time for that now.
    Inside her helmet a tiny voice whispered, “Droids.” It was another soldier from her squad, deployed somewhere farther down the ridge from her position. The recon trooper was too excited by what he saw to use proper comm procedure and, because of the distortion caused by all the jamming equipment in use, she didn’t recognize his voice. Probably Tami, she thought. But they were all excited. Except for Sergeant Makx Maganinny, the recon squad leader, this would be their firsttaste of combat. Evidently Tami had already been able to bring his electrobinoculars to bear and was directly observing the assembling army below the ridge. From her position, Odie