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for perhaps three hours.
    The roaring in her ears resolved itself into an alarm. Yuuzhan Vong were coming. She heard the roar of thrusters from whichever squadrons were at the ready—it would be Blackmoon at this hour.
    Jag was waiting for her in the hallway—the special, secured hall of the biotics building reserved for the pilots of Twin Suns Squadron. Other doors were sliding open. Piggy saBinring, struggling to fasten the seal of his pilot’s suit over his expansive Gamorrean stomach, emerged.
    “What’s our objective?” Jaina asked. Jag held out a datapad for her to look at, but her eyes wouldn’t focus on it. She irritably waved it away.
    “It looks like an assault on this location,” Jag synopsized. “Flying vehicles only, no sign of ground troops.
Lusankya
’s squadrons have some of the enemy forces engaged in orbit. More will be here in moments.”
    There was an explosion, not far away, as incoming fire hit the shields that protected the biotics facility. All the transparisteel viewports on the west face of the building rattled.
    “Correction,” Jag said. “They’ll be here now.”
    “Let’s move.” Jaina led her half-dressed, half-awake squadron to their turbolift.
       Corran Horn, pilot and Jedi Knight, flying as Rogue Nine, activated his repulsors and smoothly lifted off the ferrocrete of Rogue Squadron’s new docking bay, up through a gap where, moments before, the ceiling had been; the building’s roof was still cantilevering out of the way. The altitude gave him a better look at the conflict—Yuuzhan Vong coral ships, the equivalent of light cruisers, hovered in the distance both east and west, protected byscreens of coralskippers, and launched barrages of plasma at the biotics building and its outbuildings. So far, the base’s shields, removed not that long before from faltering New Republic capital ships, were holding up well against the assault. “Come on, Leth.”
    “Pick, pick, pick.” Leth Liav’s X-wing rose up beside Corran’s. Leth, a Sullustan female, had been a fighter pilot before being shot down and captured by the Yuuzhan Vong. Placed in an environment bubble and launched through space toward Borleias’s atmosphere in a show of Yuuzhan Vong cruelty, she and several of her fellows had been saved by some fancy flying on the part of Twin Suns Squadron. Corran doubted that, in better times, she would ever have qualified for the famed Rogue Squadron, but here, with attrition high and options few, she’d been welcomed.
    “Leader to squad, less chatter, please.” Colonel Darklighter sounded as businesslike as ever. “Indicate readiness. Leader is ready. Two?”
    “Two ready.”
    “Three?”
    As the roll call continued, the third member of Corran’s shield trio, Dakorse Teep, rose into position. “Rogue Seven, all green.”
    Corran grimaced. In Teep’s case,
green
didn’t just refer to the condition of his engines. Teep was a teenager who should have been palling around on the playground with Corran’s son Valin, only a few years Teep’s junior. Corran heard Leth announce “Eight, four lit and ready,” then he said, “Nine, optimum.”
    He was the last one to call in readiness. Rogue Squadronwas reduced to nine members now, three shield trios. Other squadrons were in worse condition, some of them reduced in numbers so fast that they had to be decommissioned or temporarily merged with other depleted units until reinforcements could swell them out into discrete squads again.
    “We’re on the cruiser to the east,” Gavin announced. “Senior members have proton torps; everyone else, you’ll have to make do with lasers. Sorry. Break by shield trios … now.” He suited action to words, and the three members of One Flight lofted, rising above the protection of the facility’s vertical shields, staying only a few dozen meters beneath the horizontal shield overhead.
    Corran waited a beat while Two Flight followed, then he led Leth and Teep up. To her credit,