Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Read Online Free Page B

coral superheat and explode, propelled out as the flesh beneath the coral was instantly transformed into steam.
    Blackish blood poured down the beast’s right flank. The creature roared, a noise like the offspring of a ground-quake and distant thunder, and poured plasma fire after the six snubfighters. But still it came on, toward them, toward the
Record Time
.
    “Got it,” the Twi’lek engineer said.
    “Get ready,” Lando said. “We’ll try to time it to the X-wings’ next pass if they’re back in time.”
    The woman began elbow-crawling, freeing Lando’s droid.
    Lando suddenly found two stumps in the way before him. He looked up. They weren’t stumps. They were the legs of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, encased in vonduun crab armor. The warrior’s amphistaff was straight as a spear, its tapered tail pointed right at Lando’s back; the warrior held it up, ready to plunge.
    The point came down and a dark shape shielded Lando from it, from the dazzling display of plasma and laser energy overhead. Lando heard a human scream, and abruptly the Yuuzhan Vong warrior was flat on the grass,his feet kicking centimeters from Lando’s nose. One of the soldiers was atop him, but was already going limp, the amphistaff driven clear through his back.
    From his position, Lando had a view under the skirt plates of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior’s armor. As the warrior tossed aside the soldier’s body, Lando angled his blaster rifle in and fired, hitting the warrior where neither leg armor nor skirt armor protected. This time it was the Yuuzhan Vong who cried out in pain. The warrior jerked and writhed, agony twisting his body apparently beyond the level that even a Yuuzhan Vong could endure.
    Lando’s bodyguard droid landed between Lando and the warrior. It kicked out against the amphistaff. Its blow hurled the weapon away, though the amphistaff, pliant again, bit the droid; the attack, faster than Lando’s eye could follow, did not penetrate the droid’s armor and would not have damaged the droid if it had. The amphistaff flew meters away.
    The droid stood over the warrior, aimed carefully, and began firing.
    Lando twisted around. The giant creature behind them, still pouring blood, had picked up speed. Knowing it was injured, perhaps dying, it was charging the
Record Time
.
    The Twi’lek engineer had the detonator in her hand, her thumb over the button.
    “Wait,” Lando said.
    She turned an anguished expression toward him, but didn’t argue.
    The roar of the returning X-wings began to rattle everyone and everything in the field. Lando watched the skies with a small part of his attention and kept the rest on the oncoming creature. Its front feet were over, then past the buried cache of explosives, and its main bodywas moving into place above the disturbed ground that marked its location.
    Lando swallowed. If he was successful, the beast would die. Innocent, and Lando found it painful to watch it lumber toward him, toward its death.
    He put the blame on the Yuuzhan Vong. It was better than accepting every bit of responsibility for killing a tremendous creature that, but for its controllers, might never have endangered him.
    The X-wing roar rose in volume, and the plasma cannons on the beast diverted their streams of fire from the
Record Time
into the air. Lando saw the vehicles flash in from two sides, north and south this time instead of east and west. He saw red lasers flash down into the blackness of the beast’s voids, saw return plasma fire clip an X-wing’s underside and begin burrowing in.
    Then the snubfighters were gone, the plasma cannons sending fiery destruction after them. “Now!” Lando shouted.
    He didn’t even see the woman press the button; he was aware only of the fire, reddish yellow and as evil looking as anything produced by the Yuuzhan Vong, roiling out from under the beast. It engulfed the creature and slammed Lando with heat and noise; he buried his face in the grass to escape it.
    A moment later, he