Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Read Online Free

harmlessly into them. Lando watched as a warrior of the Yuuzhan Vong hurtled between two of them, his vonduun crab armor dark but gleaming, and whipped his amphistaff back and to the right as he passed. The staff, rigid, swept toward the droid’s midsection, but the droid caught it with a free hand, its own motion a blur. The droid aimed its heavy blaster and fired, a burst of energy tearing through the Vong warrior. The warrior jerked backward, convulsed by the outpouring of blaster damage, and hit the ground steaming.
    A blow to Lando’s back not hard enough to be a thud bug hurled him onto the grass, and he dimly heard his bodyguard say, “Down, sir.” Then the droid was firing.Lando half-rose and saw a Yuuzhan Vong warrior approaching at a dead run, zigzagging to avoid the droid’s blasterfire.
    From his knees, Lando aimed to the right of the onrushing enemy and fired, spraying laser energy up and down into open space, then traversed left. His shots flanked the droid’s, and the Yuuzhan Vong warrior, now five steps away, dodged into them, taking a blast in the knee. He fell forward and skidded toward Lando and the droid, his amphistaff whipping around, pliant.
    Lando stood. He and the droid backed away at divergent angles and continued to pour fire into the fallen warrior. The warrior rose, his armor blackened in several places, and drew back his hand to throw something, but a blast—Lando wasn’t sure whether it was his or the droid’s—caught it in the throat. It toppled backward.
    Lando nodded at the droid. “I’m a businessman,” he said.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You know what that means.”
    “You hate being here, sir.”
    “You’ve got that right.” The two of them circled around the smoking body, continuing toward Lando’s force.
    Now the armor-plated beast was visible around the building’s edge. The muscles beneath and surrounding its armor plates rippled and the plasma cannons all over its back tilted, taking aim—directly toward Lando, it seemed to him.
    He dropped to the ground and began firing.
    Luke, Mara, and Corran took a high-speed run over the base area, giving them a split-second view of the Yuuzhan Vong building, of the
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, of the tremendous beast hurling plasma into the transport’s side.
    Luke sighed. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, which Jaina Solo had nicknamed “ranges,” and later was known by its Yuuzhan Vong name, a
rakamat
, and saw the tactic he’d used to destroy it had knocked him out for hours. He couldn’t afford to do that now. “Let’s do what we can to distract the thing from the ground troops,” he said. “Two Flight, Three Flight, Four Flight, whenever you get through playing with those skips back there, we can put you to work up here where the fight is.”
    He led Mara and Corran in a tight loop back toward the engagement zone. All three X-wings began juking just before they cleared the jungle canopy, and plasma danced up through the air all around them. He fired linked lasers at the enormous beast and saw his blast and those of his flightmates swallowed by the creature’s void defenses. Then they were over jungle again.
    Lando elbow-crawled forward, chanting, “I’m too old for this, I’m a businessman, I’m too old for this, I want a drink.” The rhythm of his own words kept him from being fully aware of the sweat dripping from him, of the fear radiating from him as plasma fire flashed by mere meters over his head and into the side of the
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. Return fire crossed from the other direction, heavy laser cannon blasts that would evaporate him if they grazed him. His droid kept pace, walking slowly so as not to leave Lando behind.
    He’d crawled into a circle of troops before he knew it—six of them, five humans and a Twi’lek, only three of them with shoulder arms. “Where are your blasters?” he asked.
    The Twi’lek, a red-skinned female, huddled against the mound of her pack. “We’re engineers.”
    One of