This would be fatal for troops caught in the open, but more pertinently, it would force starfighters on both sides to withdraw or ground themselves; between the natural sensor interference of the atmosphere itself and the thick clouds of fiery smoke, any who sought to continue the fight would be flying entirely blind.
It would also, as was pointed out to Lando Calrissian by Fenn Shysa, force the domes to remain closed over the surface-to-orbit weapons, as well as temporarily overload the heat exchangers that cooled the turbolasers in the rings of towers. “And if you don’t mind me bringin’ it up, General,” Shysa had gone on, “maybe the only tactical error this Shadowspawn character has made so far is that he’s clustered all his planetary-defense weapons together, right on top of that big hill.”
Lando had nodded. “Easier to defend.”
“That they are,” Shysa had agreed. “Even if it’s not them defending ’em, you follow?”
Lando had considered this for a moment. Only a moment; he had never been slow to jump on an opponent’s weakness. “Fenn, my friend,” he’d said slowly, “have I told you today how much I admire the way you think?”
When those smoke-thunderheads rolled over the dome, fire was not their only rain. Screened by the advancing flame front, three Republic capital ships came in low and slow, feeling their way through the atmosphere. The capital ships did not fire on the domes; through the hurricane of dust, smoke, and flame within the firestorm, even the considerable power of their weapons would have taken some time to breach the armor—time they simply did not have.
Two of them scattered a downpour of landers filled with Republic marines into the ring of ion-turbo emplacements. The third of the capital ships was the Remember Alderaan. Its landers dropped into place around the gravity gun.
For a moment, all of the battle was contained by the raging firestorm. Starfighters could not fly, overheated turbolaser towers could not fire, armored domes could not be opened, and no ground forces could leave either the landers or Imperial bunkers.
But the storm didn’t last long; in minutes, the tons of dust and sand and gravel it sucked up into itself reached the tipping point beyond which the debris no longer added to the conflagration but began to smother it. As the storm shrank, the three Republic battle cruisers withdrew behind its retreating face.
Seconds later—while the rock and sand still glowed scarlet with heat—turbolasers began to cough plasma blasts at incoming starfighters. Concealed blast doors swung open across the summit and disgorged streams of armored stormtroopers and files of rumbling hovertanks. Republic landers opened fire with their antipersonnel turrets, and their own troop ramps swung down to make a path for charging marines, and the Battle of Mindor was now joined on the ground. Face-to-face. Blaster-to-blaster.
Knife-to-knife.
WHEN GROUP CAPTAIN KLICK AND HIS COMPANY OF elite commandos had opened the wide arching doorway to the Sorting Center, the place had been in chaos. The bombardment on the surface above sent shock waves through the stone that made the floors shudder and shift continuously like a long, low-level groundquake, and filled the air with a just-above-subsonic rumble like a nonstop roll of thunder; the prisoners, panicked at the rain of dust and chunks of stone from the vault ceiling overhead, rushed the doorway en masse. Klick’s men had driven them back; stun blasts dropped the leading ranks, and full-power blasterfire over their heads sent the others cringing toward the far walls. Klick had kicked his way through the twitching bodies, raised his E-11, and triggered another burst over the heads of the cowering prisoners.
“Down! Facedown! On the floor! Now!” He turned to the trooper beside him. “Sergeant, take Second Platoon and shoot any prisoner still on his, her, or its feet five seconds from now. The rest of you, on me.”
He led them trotting through the black-gleaming fusion-formed cavern to the Election Center’s door.
“Fourth Platoon: front and center.” He stepped to one side. “Seal this door! No one in, no one out. First Platoon: firing position in support of Four. The rest of you, prepare to repel assault.”
A couple of troopers from Fourth Platoon deployed their foamplast canisters. Engineered for a quick-and-dirty seal for envirosuit ruptures or minor hull punctures, foamplast would expand to fill any and all available space around its application point, then harden almost instantly. A thin bead around the edges of the door sealed it permanently in place, and not a moment too soon—only seconds after the foamplast had set, Klick heard the whine of the door’s servos as someone tried to open it from the far side.
“Back!” he snapped. “Company: form up and prime weapons! Prepare to fire on my order!”
For a long, long second the only sound in the Sorting Center was the rustle and snap of blasters being readied and the clacking of the nearest troopers dropping prone, those behind to one knee, and the rear taking firing stances with carbines at their shoulders. Klick himself stepped away from the door; the only way to open a foamplast-sealed door was a breaching charge.
Seconds ticked past with no explosion, and just when Klick began to wonder if he’d imagined the servo whine, a spot high on the right-hand side of the door glowed red and brightened almost instantly to white before it burst and vaporized around a bar of green plasma.
All right, two ways through a foamplast-sealed door, Klick amended silently. Breaching charge, and lightsaber.
A green lightsaber … !
Klick had a terrible premonition. “Hold fire,” he warned. “Anybody shoots before my order, I’ll kill him myself.”
The bar of green plasma cut a ragged oval through the door. When the cut was finished and the oval slab of durasteel fell through a shower of sparks to clang on the fusion-formed stone, Klick did not give the order to fire. He did not give any order at all. He simply stood, staring, awestruck beyond words.
Standing in the doorway were only two men. One was a tallish wiry man with dark skin, and blood trickling sluggishly down his shaven scalp, dressed in Pawn robes and holding an E-11 dangling by its shoulder strap. The other, smaller man was dressed in a sodden and filthy Rebel Alliance flight suit, and his damply tousled hair of radiation-bleached blond stuck in tangles to a tanned face whose features, Klick ever-so-slowly realized, had the exact contours of his very fondest dream …
Klick’s mouth went dry and his legs went numb and he could barely force the words through his slack lips. “Emperor Skywalker …”
He dropped to one knee, undogged his helmet, yanked it off, and inclined his head in reverence. “Down weapons! Down weapons! Buckets off and kneel to your Emperor!” he cried. “Your pardon, my lord, I did not know you!”
REPUBLIC MARINES FEVERISHLY TRIED TO DIG IN AROUND the ion-turbo emplacements while they poured fire into the advancing stormtroopers. Their armored landers added antipersonnel punch with turret-mounted SoroSuub clusterfrag launchers; the whole curve of the base’s summit sparkled with thousands of tiny detonations, each of which scattered high-velocity flechettes, though most of them only clattered off the rocks in a rushing roar like a Chadian monsoon.
The stormtroopers advanced at a run behind the cover of heavily shielded hovertanks. The tanks’ forward cannon arrays pounded away at the landers and blasted marines to bloody bits, and their drivers ran them right up against the landers’ skirt armor. From there the stormtroopers could charge into hand-to-hand—but when they did, the stormtroopers discovered to their considerable dismay that Republic marines, unlike many other enemies, didn’t seem at all intimidated by the stormtroopers’ vibroknucklers, and that the marines favored, for close combat, 18 cm aKraB clip-point vibrodaggers that could cut Mark III armor like rendered gorgan blubber.
Around the dome that housed the gravity gun, twelve landers from the Remember Alderaan had come down in a double ring: four close in around the emplacement with the other eight encircling them. The inner four were too close to the emplacement’s infantry bunkers for artillery or tank fire—so close that the landers’ own antipersonnel turrets could not d
epress their aim to ground level; all they could do was chip away at the upper curves of the bunkers and the gravity gun’s dome. Black-armored stormtroopers came swarming out from the bunkers like ravenous carrion beetles, using the inner landers themselves as cover from the fire of the surrounding eight while they went to work on the hulls with fusion torches and shaped-blast breaching charges. If any of the stormtroopers found it odd that these twelve landers, unlike the ones around the ion-turbo emplacements, remained tightly sealed instead of disgorging their own swarms of marines, none of them remarked on it.
The explanation for this unusual tactic was discovered by one particular stormtrooper officer, who led one of the strike teams that blasted their way into one of the landers and found no Republic forces at all—only a remote computer link jacked into the pilot’s station, and another jacked into the fire-control board. The lander was not, however, actually empty. It was packed, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, with detonite fused to motion detectors.
It was the last thing the officer saw—the simultaneous explosions of all four landers vaporized not only him and his strike team, but also all of the hundreds of stormtroopers nearby, as well as buckling the blast doors of the infantry bunkers.
Though most of the force of the explosions was directed inward toward the bunkers and the gravity gun, the residual blast was enough to rock the other eight landers and to shove several of them skidding a few meters. Before they even came back to rest, their gang ramps had flipped down to unleash a different kind of infantry.
These troops did not shout or howl; they did not charge with blasters roaring. Instead they deployed with silent efficiency, leapfrogging from cover to cover toward the bunkers.
Another black-armored officer got a glimpse of them through his bunker’s damaged blast doors as they came on, and he muttered a curse that the oncoming infantry would have recognized—even though they would have sneered at the officer’s Core Worlds accent—as being a debased hand-me-down dilution of their native tongue. “Fall back!” he shouted. “Barricade the corridors! Hold the corners and crossways!”
Because the last thing this officer wanted to do was waste his men by going head-to-head against Mandalorians.
THE CAVERNS THROUGH WHICH HAN, LEIA, AND CHEWBACCA walked—and R2-D2 rolled—had shrunk to a series of mazy tunnelways. In the light of R2’s extensible torch, the stone looked black but was also semitranslucent, showing gleams of internal crystalline structure like Harterran moonstone.
Han walked between R2 and Chewie, head down, silent. He couldn’t stop thinking about Mindorese running wild all over the Falcon. And who was flying her right now? Whose grubby hands were all over his controls? “Growr,” Chewie agreed softly, seeing Han’s anger. But then he lifted a hand to gesture ahead and said, “Herroowarr hunnoo.”
Han frowned and continued along the tunnel. Leia had been walking briskly since they’d entered the tunnels; she’d given up trying to talk to him after a couple of minutes and now was so far ahead that all he could see of her was the distant swing of her glow rod. He nodded. “I think she’s mad at me. You think she’s mad at me?”
“Meroo hooerrree.”
“It’s not my fault.” Han scowled. It seemed like he said that too often. “It’s not my fault—I warned her, didn’t I? Didn’t I warn her that we’d be sorry for rescuing those scumballs?”
Teeeooorr weep? R2’s whistle came out dry and somewhat ironic, and Han had a pretty good idea what he meant.
“Not sorry about finding you. That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Man … she’s really upset, huh?”
“Rowroo,” Chewbacca said thoughtfully.
“Really?” Han brightened a little. “You think?”
Chewie grumbled a bit more, waving Han on. Han chewed a corner of his lip, staring ahead at the swing of Leia’s glow rod, and came to a decision. “Maybe you’re right. Stay here with the droid.”
R2 put in, weep weep teeerrr.
“You, too? Look, it’s my problem, let me handle it, huh?” Han started walking faster. Pretty soon he was trotting. “Princess! Hey, Princess, wait up, huh?”
She didn’t even look back. He broke into a run, and when he caught up he fell into step beside her. “Leia, wait. I need to check your shoulder.”
“No time.”
Han frowned. “You say that like you know where we’re going.”
“I do. Sort of.” She pointed the glow rod into the darkness ahead. “That way.”
Han squinted. All he saw was darkness. “What’s that way?”
“Luke.”
“Luke? Are you kid—uh, I mean, you’re sure? How can you be sure?”
She didn’t even look at him. “I’m sure.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, I guess you are.” Han stopped for a deep breath, then had to hustle to catch up with her again. “Y’know, Leia, this Force stuff, it’s—y’know, it’s one thing to see Luke do it but—”
“But what?” Now she did stop, and she did look at him, and from the flash her eyes picked up off the glow rod he kind of wished he’d been smart enough, about fifteen seconds ago, to bite his tongue in half.
“It’s just that you—y’know, you and I—”
“I’m sorry I make you uncomfortable, General Solo,” she said tartly. “I suppose you’d be better off with someone like—”
“Well, fuse my bus-bars,” Han said. “Chewie was right: you are jealous.”
“What? What did that mountain of mange say about me? I’ll hold him down and shave his—”
“Easy, easy, come on, Leia—”
“I’m not jealous, I’m angry. She took you completely off-guard.”
Han flinched. “Not completely—”
“You think she would have caught you flat-footed if she wasn’t good-looking?”
“Maybe not,” Han allowed through the beginning of a slow grin. “But I am pretty sure that if she wasn’t good-looking, you wouldn’t have hit her so hard.”
“Hope I broke her nose,” Leia muttered darkly, then suddenly answered his grin and added a little chuckle. “ ‘Fuse my bus-bars’? Really?”
Han shrugged, feeling himself start to blush. Again. “Just an expression I’m trying out. When I get too old to be dashing, I’ll have to be colorful.”
“You’re already colorful,” she said. “And you’ll always be dashing.”
“Aw, you take the fun out of everything.”
A burst of static from his comlink made them both jump. “Han! What the hell are you doing?”
Han fished out his comlink. “Lando? I’m standing in a cave, knucklehead. What the hell are you doing? Why are you even in this system?”
“Han, that was Hobbie you just clipped! He’s going down—again! Cease fire and get the hell out of my battle!”
“That was Hobbie I just what?”
“Han, if you don’t stand down, we’ll have to take you down!”
Han started to run, not going anywhere but he just had to move, shouting into the comlink. “Oh, no—oh, no no no, you don’t understand! That’s not us in there—”
“Great! Rogue Leader—light ’er up!”
“Don’t do it! Wedge, don’t! Don’t you dare shoot down my ship!”
“Don’t you mean my ship?” Lando said. “Should have known it wasn’t you—flies like a bantha in a tar pit—you fly more like a constipated nerf with a broken leg—”
“Lando, I’m serious—put one scratch on the Falcon and I’ll—”
“Never find it under all the dents,” Lando finished for him. “Wedge—see if you can take out just the thrusters.”
“Lando—Wedge—” Han grimaced in frustration and turned back to Leia, who had stopped a few meters behind him and now stood motionless, frowning in concentration. “Come on, Princess!”
She shook her head. “Something’s wrong here …”
“Oh, you think? Is it the lost-inside-a-volcano thing? Or the losing-the-Falcon-and-it’s-about-to-be-shot-down thing? Or maybe it’s the we�
�ve-just-managed-to-lead-all-our-friends-along-with-half-the-Alliance-into-a-giant-death-trap thing?”
“Not so much,” she said. “It’s more the we’ve-been-running-in-the-dark-through-a-cave-and-we-haven’t-fallen-down-a-hole thing.”
“What?”
“Artoo,” she called back along the tunnel, “do an environmental scan and analysis—I think these caves aren’t natural. Something made this—”
Han looked around and froze in place. “You mean,” he said slowly, “some kind of rock-looking critters that can, like, melt themselves out of the walls and floors and stuff?”
“I don’t know, maybe—” She stopped and looked back at Han, who was surrounded by rock-looking critters that appeared to have melted themselves out of the walls and floor.
“Good call,” Han said, and then the floor opened beneath him and he dropped out of sight.
“Han!” Leia sprang toward him, but the stone of the tunnel had gone soft and gooey, and an instant later it parted beneath her feet and she fell into darkness.
THE STORMTROOPER OFFICER WHO KNELT ON THE SHINING black stone of the cavern’s floor stammered out his unlikely story without even rising from one knee; Luke didn’t bother to listen. He barely heard anything after the group captain had started babbling about how powerful a masterpiece he’d found Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge to be. Another blasted fan of that blasted show …
Who’d have thought so much damage could be done by one stupid story?
“This was the objective of his entire Great Cause!” the group captain exclaimed. “To rescue you from the evil Rebellion and restore you to your rightful throne!”
“Not exactly me,” Luke muttered.
“My lord Emperor?”
“Forget it.” Luke looked around at the dozens of prisoners prone on the cavern floor. “Who are these people?”
“No one of consequence, my lord—Rebel captives, bound for the slave pits. Don’t concern yourself.”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 20
