Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Read Online Free Page A

the others, a long-faced male with a blasterrifle, said, “
They’re
engineers.” He fired at the legs of the giant creature lumbering in their direction.
    “Engineers?” Lando asked. “With explosives?”
    The woman nodded.
    “You’re hiding behind your explosives?”
    She nodded again, her dismayed expression suggesting that she understood the insanity of it.
    “Dig,” Lando said. “A shallow hole. Large enough to put all those explosives in.”
    “No,” said the trooper with the blaster. “We’ll just leave them behind and get clear of them.”
    “No, we’re digging.” Lando glanced at the Twi’lek woman, who was frozen, her hand halfway to her field shovel, looking between him and the trooper.
    The trooper gave Lando an ingratiating smile. “I’m only a noncommissioned officer, but that beats a civilian on the battlefield. We leave.”
    Lando grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and dragged him close. The trooper had to be younger than twenty, despite his apparent poise. “Listen to me, bantha fodder,” Lando said. “I blew up a Death Star before you were born. In twenty seconds I can conclude a conversation with General Antilles, who blew up that Death Star with me, and I’ll be General Calrissian again, and and you’ll spend the rest of your military career cleaning refreshers on Kessel. Or you can dig. Which is it?”
    The trooper looked at him for one long moment, during which streaks of plasma began to look like solid lines in the air above them. “I guess we dig, sir.”
    “Right.” Lando released him. He looked at the Twi’lek engineer and gestured at the trooper. “Give him your shovel.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Lando stretched out, took up his blaster rifle, and took the trooper’s place at the perimeter. He fired a few timesat distant Yuuzhan Vong warriors and once at the creature. Then he turned to his bodyguard and smiled. “You know, that’s the kind of worker negotiations I really love.”
    The droid nodded. “Yes, sir.”
    The latest flyby of Luke and his wingmates, during which some of their shots were again absorbed by the
rakamat’s
voids and others hit the side of the Yuuzhan Vong building, showed one party of soldiers in a circle directly ahead of the oncoming
rakamat
. The soldiers seemed to be digging a hole. “What do you think?” he heard Mara ask. “Idiots?”
    “Picnickers,” Luke offered.
    “There’s a thought.”
    Luke led Mara and Corran back toward the Yuuzhan Vong base. A moment later, three more Twin Suns settled into formation with them.
    “Good to see you,” Luke said. “Split off and approach the base from the far side so that you reach the edge of the canopy half a second after we do. They’re only expecting three of us. Ready, break.”
    The ground here was soft; they had the hole dug and three engineers’ worth of explosives loaded into it in less than a standard minute. The eight of them crawled away from the hole and toward the
Record Time
.
    The Twi’lek woman wasn’t crawling. She was flat on her back toward the rear of the column, fiddling with a remote detonator, while Lando’s droid dragged her by the feet. The droid kept up sustained fire aimed behind them, toward the
rakamat
and the main engagement area of the infantry fight.
    Lando, elbow-crawling at the head of the column, heard the roar of the returning X-wings. He knew theirattacks on the beast were futile, but was grateful for their strafing runs, which had kept him and this unit from falling under constant fire.
    Three X-wings flashed by from the right, unloading laserfire on the beast’s left side. The voids flicked around into the path of the attacks, and Lando thought he saw the snubfighters’ red laser beams actually bend as they entered the voids.
    Then three X-wings flashed by from the left, pouring laserfire into the beast’s right side. The six snubfighters crossed like a demonstration of trick flying and disappeared beyond the jungle canopy.
    Lando saw yorik