Star Wars 396 - The Dark Nest Trilogy III - The Swarm War

by Troy Denning

  “This one has been watching.” Saba displayed her entire set of fangs. “She is very proud.”

  “Proud?” Leia cried. “I could’ve been killed!”

  “No.” Saba shook her head. “This one taught you too well.”

  Leia felt her jaw drop. “Is that a compliment, Master Sebatyne?”

  “Yez.” Saba thumped her hand against her chest. “This one did very well, given the material she had to work with.”

  “Gee, that’s swell,” Han said in Leia’s earpiece. “But if you two can break up the mutual-admiration meeting for just a minute, what about that second bomb?”

  “No problem.” Leia checked her scanner again. The signal had moved perhaps fifty meters in the last few seconds, but it had grown so weak that she could barely find it anymore. “Blast—now it’s sinking.”

  “Yez, that is what happenz when you drop something heavy in the river,” Saba said. She activated her thermal detonator, then tossed it in the direction of the bomb and used the Force to guide it to the fading blip on their scanners. “You will have to be more careful next time, Jedi Solo.”

  The blip faded from the scanner. The tiny bloop of something small entering the water sounded from the same direction; then the sharp wooosh of an underwater detonation rose up through the trees.

  “Did you get it?” Han asked.

  Leia checked her scanner. There was still no blip on the screen. “Let’s say we did—because even if we didn’t, the Chiss will never find it, either.” She motioned Saba to start climbing. “Let’s go—it’s time to go get my daughter.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The interior of Stomper One filled with soft whirrings and electronic chirpings as the assault shuttle’s passengers began their final systems checks. Each soldier worked his servomotors and confirmed the calibration of his targeting systems with two adjacent units, then executed a quick comm scan to be certain he was receiving on all channels. Because this platoon was assigned directly to the assault commander—Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker—they all performed a vocabulator check as well. The phrase “check sound, check Basic” reverberated through the passenger cabin thirty-two times—always in the ultradeep, ultramale version of Lando Calrissian’s voice, which remained the standard for the entire line of YVH combat droids.

  Sitting behind the controls of the assault shuttle, Luke found the mechanical symphony strangely isolating. As the sole biological unit in the assault brigade, he had already felt a bit out of place, and the stark efficiency of his YVH 5-S Bugcrunchers left him feeling more alone than he cared to admit. The droids would perform as well as—if not better than—living beings, but there was nothing like a little laughter to calm a soldier’s nerves before combat.

  As soon as the YVHs had finished their vocabulator checks, they began to spray vacuum-resistant lubricant into one another’s joints. The whole assault shuttle was quickly filled with an oily-sweet odor that gave Luke watery eyes and a queasy stomach. He had never expected to miss the smell of another soldier’s sweat quite so much.

  The gravelly voice of the Megador’s Tactical Control officer came over the flight-deck speaker. “Task Force Stomper cleared for assault. Be advised: Colony capital ships and dartship swarms attempting to return to support Ackbar. Time of breakthrough uncertain.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Luke did not bother to check his tactical display for a tally of the enemy vessels—the number was going to be high, and it did not matter. In fifteen minutes, he would either be aboard the Ackbar fighting Raynar, or the eternal war that Jacen had foreseen would be erupting into full blossom.

  Luke sealed his vacuum suit, then transmitted the attack order to the other fifty assault shuttles in his all-droid brigade and pushed his own throttles forward.

  “Stomper in,” he reported to the Megador.

  “Good hunting, my friend.” This voice belonged to Pellaeon. “And may the Force be with you.”

  Luke thanked the admiral for the good wishes and promised that his faith in the Jedi plan was not misplaced, then turned his attention to the assault.

  The Admiral Ackbar lay only ten kilometers ahead, her bump-nosed silhouette surrounded by a swirling shell of Killik dartships that were rapidly being vaporized by Alliance turbolaser strikes. Her main engines lit space as she struggled to retreat toward Tenupe, but she was ensnared by the heavy-duty tractor-beams of half a dozen “pirate-nabber” Star Destroyers identical to herself.

  Raynar would have been much wiser to send his fighter screen out to counterattack his captors, but he appeared to be holding the dartships back to deal with Task Force Stomper. That was what Admiral Bwua’tu had predicted he would do, and so far the Bothan seemed correct.

  Beyond the Ackbar, dozens of what Luke thought of as Shard-class capital ships were abandoning the battle on Tenupe to rush to Raynar’s aid. Somewhat chunky and conical, they ranged in length from a kilometer and a half to nearly ten, but each had one broad, rounded end and several jagged sides. It almost appeared that the strange flotilla had been constructed by shattering an asteroid or a small moon. Judging by the halo of dispersion flashes and fiery streaks around the vessels, each was also very well shielded and heavily armed.

  The Battle of Tenupe itself continued to rage, a flashing red stain that now spread across a quarter of the planet. Most of the Chiss fleet was down in the clouds and hidden from sight, but some of the Colony’s larger ships were silhouetted against the flickering brilliance below. The four nest ships that had escaped the Jedi at the Murgo Choke were clustered near the heart of the battle, pouring a terrible rain of fire down upon the planet from one side of their hulls while the other hurled turbolaser potshots at the Alliance.

  What impressed Luke most was the Killiks’ inventiveness in completing their fleet. Arrayed around the edges of the battle were dozens of ancient megafreighters, their distinctive ring shapes surrounded by dark, swirling clouds that suggested the freighters were serving as staging areas for dartship swarms. Meanwhile hundreds of smaller vessels, visible to the naked eyed as triangular specks, were flitting around the center of the fight in erratic flight patterns, each pouring fire down from a single turbolaser. Chiss megamasers were blasting the gnat-like targets out of orbit whenever their gunnery crews could get a target-lock, but it would clearly take a while to exterminate them completely.

  The Ackbar’s shields began to flicker with overload discharge, then collapsed in a string of bright, colorful flashes.

  Control’s voice came over the speaker in Luke’s helmet. “Target is shields down. All main batteries switch to formation defense, all squadrons released for strafing runs.”

  The order had little to do with Task Force Stomper, but Luke was glad Control had included his channel in the transmission array. The sound of a nonelectronic voice reminded him that he was not attacking the Ackbar alone, that he and his bugcrunchers were merely the tip of a spear being driven by an entire attack fleet.

  The Alliance batteries quickly obeyed Control’s order and switched fire to the approaching Shard flotilla. The fighter squadrons left the safe stations where they had been waiting out the turboblaster exchange and streaked in to attack, painting whole swaths of space blue with their engine efflux. The Ackbar’s close-range cannons weaved a web of laser bolts in their paths, and the Colony’s dartships drew back, creating an even tighter shell around the beleaguered Star Destroyer.

  Bad mistake.

  Bwua’tu had predicted the tactic. The Alliance fighter squadrons blew through the shell behind a flurry of proton torpedoes, then fell on the Ackbar like a thousand hawk-bats, strafing her weapons turrets and clearing the way for Task Force Stomper.

  A squadron and a half of starfighters—the eighteen craft that had been in the maintenance bays when the Killiks captured the Ackbar—dropped out of the hangar bay and turned to meet Luke’s assault shuttles. Bwua’tu had predicted that, too. Rogue Squadron slashed in from its escort station and eliminated the interceptors in three fiery p
asses.

  By then, Task Force Stomper had closed to within three kilometers of the Ackbar, with only the dartships to prevent them from reaching their target. The swarm peeled away from its combat with the starfighter squadrons and came after the assault shuttles.

  Exactly as Bwua’tu had expected.

  One of the Alliance’s pirate-nabber Star Destroyers slid its tractor beam over and simply pulled the dartships away in a tumbling mass. Nothing remained between Task Force Stomper and its target but a thousand meters of laser-laced space. Every second or so, a blossom of color would flare somewhere in the task force as an Ackbar cannon bolt dissipated against a shuttle’s shields or a stray dartship was destroyed by a YVH gunner. But for the most part, the starfighter squadrons and the pirate-nabber tractor beam did a remarkable job of deflecting the Killik attacks.

  Luke activated his task force command channel. “We’re on our own now. Fan out and get in fast.”

  Instead of acknowledgments, he was greeted by a static-filled pause precisely 1.2 seconds long—the standard delay a YVH droid allowed for a biological unit to finish an incomplete thought.

  Then an ultradeep Lando Calrissian voice said, “Sir, ‘fan out and get in fast’ is not a clear order.”

  “Sorry.” Luke sighed, wishing there had been room to add basic soft-logic interpretation to the YVH processing unit. “Disperse to assigned zones and penetrate target hull.”

  “Stomper Two acknowledging,” the platoon’s droid leader responded.

  “Stomper Three acknowledging.”

  A long series of deep-voiced acknowledgments began to sound inside Luke’s helmet—forty-nine other platoons in all. He passed the time by reminding himself that the bugcruncher brigade would prove well worth the irritation once Task Force Stomper entered the Ackbar. They were better armored and far more deadly than living commandos, and they would be immune to the Force-based influence attacks of Raynar Thul and Lomi Plo.

  The assault shuttles were just beginning to fan out when one of them suddenly flew apart. There was no flash or fireball. The passenger cabin simply came apart at the seams, spilling its cargo of bugcrunchers out into the void.

  As Luke was checking his tactical display to find the shuttle’s number, another one came apart.

  He frowned and opened a channel to the pilots. “Stomper Twelve, what happened to your shuttle?”

  The reply came in the electronic tones of a voice synthesizer, since Stomper Twelve’s pilot was currently floating through a vacuum and unable to produce any sounds with his own vocabulator. “It disintegrated.”

  “I can see that!” Luke said. “What caused…”

  Luke let the question trail off when he suddenly felt the Force drawing in around him, as though gathering itself for a powerful, violent release. He had just enough time to create a bubble of counterpressure around himself before every damage alarm on his control panel came to life. The cockpit simply came apart around him, and he found himself tumbling through space in the midst of a flotsam cloud.

  Raynar Thul.

  An electronic voice sounded inside Luke’s helmet. “Sir, if you were asking a question—”

  “Disregard,” Luke ordered.

  Another assault shuttle came apart, spilling another platoon of thirty-two bugcrunchers into space. This was not an attack Bwua’tu had expected—but that hardly mattered, because the Bothan always planned for what he could not foresee. He had been the one who had insisted that the Alliance specify space-assault YVHs as the platform when it purchased its new Bugcruncher Brigade.

  Luke opened a brigadewide channel. “All dismounted Stomper units continue toward original target zones under individual propulsion.”

  Again came the long string of acknowledgments. Luke used the Force to hitch a ride on a passing droid as his own platoon fired their thrusters and weaved through a blinding tangle of laser bolts, zipping starfighters, and rocket exhaust toward their target zone. They lost two units to lucky cannon strikes and three more to ramming dartships, but the Alliance starfighters were doing a good job of suppressing the enemy defenses, and Stomper One reached the Ackbar’s bridge in good order and with more than enough strength to perform their mission.

  By then, much of the rest of the brigade had also reached the Star Destroyer and were dutifully reporting their successes as they breached the hull. The entire vessel had been declared a free-fire zone, so Luke really did not need to know more. He released the platoons to their own initiative and told them to report when they had taken their objectives.

  Luke reached out in the Force and found Raynar reaching back, descending rapidly from the command deck atop the bridge structure. Raynar’s presence was as murky and heavy as always, and as soon as Luke felt it, it began to press down inside, urging him to turn back.

  Luke did not resist. He was going to leave, he wanted to leave…with Raynar. Luke began to exert his own will, pulling Raynar toward him, using Raynar’s own power against him by binding their presences together with memories from their past: of how Luke had once helped protect Raynar’s family from the Diversity Alliance, and how he had later helped Raynar’s father destroy a terrible virus that could have caused a galaxywide plague. They were going to leave together. UnuThul wished Luke to go, Luke wished UnuThul to go with him, and so they would go together. UnuThul wished it.

  The weight inside suddenly diminished as Raynar started to retreat. Luke tried to stop him, to find some part of his former student that he could hold on to. But UnuThul still had the power of the Colony behind him, and he called on that power to break the bonds of remembrance the Jedi Master had so quickly woven. His murky presence wrenched free, and the heaviness vanished from inside Luke’s chest.

  Stomper One and his assistant had already finished placing the breaching charges. The rest of the platoon was arrayed around Luke on the Ackbar’s hull, shielding him with their hulking bodies and firing their forearm-mounted blaster cannons at a flight of incoming dartships. Luke could see tiny divots forming in the droids’ laminanium body armor as the enemy’s weapons silently made their mark.

  “What are you waiting for?” Luke commed Stomper One. “Detonate!”

  But when it came to procedure, even war droids could not be hurried. “Stay clear!” Stomper One commed. “Fire in the hole!”

  Then he detonated the charge.

  Luke’s faceplate darkened against the brilliance of the blast, but not so completely that he missed the flash of Stomper One’s blaster cannons firing into the breached hull.

  Then Stomper One pronounced, “Clear!” and began ordering, “Go…go…go…” at one-second intervals, sending a bugcruncher through the hole with each command.

  By the fourth go, Luke’s faceplate had returned to its normal tint, and he could see a steady stream of captured food containers, membrosia waxes, and chunks of spitcrete gushing out the breach into space.

  “Grand Master Commander?” the lead droid asked.

  “Thanks.”

  Luke ducked through the hole into the interior of what had once been the junior officers’ mess. The lights remained on, so he could see that the chairs that had once been bolted into place along the tables had been removed by the Killiks. The far half of the room had been converted to a nursery, and the larvae were lying half out of their cells, writhing in pain from the decompression blow. Membrosia waxes and Alliance foodstuffs were still tumbling out of their lockers—or rising out of spitcrete bins—and flying out the breach with the cabin’s air.

  Raynar’s heavy presence returned, this time summoning Luke.

  The Jedi Master started toward the interior exit, where the first bugcrunchers were already trying to override the decompression safety and open the hatch. He was happy to go to Raynar. Again, Luke exerted his own will through the Force, incorporating UnuThul’s wishes, but turning them toward his own ends. He recalled his dinner with Aryn Thul, when she and Tyko had asked Luke to spare her son’s life. It was time to stop the killing, to end this war, and the J
edi Master would gladly go to Raynar to accept his surrender. UnuThul wished Luke to come, and Luke wished to end the war, and so Luke would come and accept the Colony’s surrender.

  Again, Raynar withdrew, this time so violently that Luke had no chance to prevent it. UnuThul was coming—not to Luke, but after him. The Master would have to fight. He had known it would come to this, but knowing did not make his heart any less heavy.

  The interior hatch finally irised open, and the decompression blow brought half a dozen Killiks tumbling out. The bugcrunchers opened fire with their blaster cannons, shattering the tough pressure carapaces before the bugs could react, then pushed through the doorway with weapons still blazing. By the time the fourth droid had gone through, a synthesized voice was already sounding the all-clear inside Luke’s helmet.

  Luke stepped through the hatchway and found himself in a narrow corridor littered with dead Killiks and pieces of shattered carapace. A closed hatchway sealed either end of the short passage. Two confused boxy little mouse droids were trying to make their way through the debris, determined to complete some errand that no longer mattered. A row of sealed hatches lined the opposite wall, which—if Luke recalled the Ackbar’s bridge schematic correctly—concealed storage lockers, officers’ lounges, and exercise facilities. Each was a dead end, as well as a potential hiding place for ambushers.

  The corridor was hardly the ideal place for a lightsaber duel, but it would have to do. Luke could already sense a furious Raynar Thul at the far end of the passage, using his brute Force-strength to wrest open the safety-sealed hatch.

  As soon as the last of his platoon had entered the corridor, Luke pointed to the hatch through which they’d come. “Make that hatch airtight.”

  “Airtight, sir?” Stomper One asked. “Are you certain? As S-series droids, we enjoy a significant tactical advantage in a nonpressurized environment.”

  “But I don’t.” Luke plucked at the sleeve of his vac suit. “And I don’t want to worry about ripping this. The fight is about to get rough.”