veering off now. I don't know--maybe the viceroy's having an attack of
good sense."
A'baht's thoughts leaped at once to the officially discounted claim of
a treaty between the League and something called the Grand Imperial
Union.
"Or someone else is," he said. "Maybe there's a falling-out between
friends under way over there. Let's see if we can aggravate it. Task
Forces Blackvine, Apex, Keyhole--the leashes are off. Pursue and
engage."
There were 513 Black Sword Command veterans aboard Pride of Yevetha and
more than 15,000 Yevetha.
Those proportions did not trouble Major Sorannan. His contingent was
armed with more than blasters and a profound motivation. The ship was
already under their control; dealing with its last owners was a mere
detail.
There was a precious irony, Sorannan thought, that the principle
instrumentality of their freedom was something called a slave
circuit.
Within three minutes of his pressing the button that turned the ships
away from the New Republic fleet and toward Byss, he was joined in the
fire control room by Captain Eistern and three other men whose former
duty stations had been elsewhere in the engineering section.
"Looks as though you managed without us, sir," said Eistern, observing
the carnage in the pit. Tendrils of smoke were still rising from the
consoles where three blackened corpses were slumped.
"They gave me no trouble," Sorannan said with evident satisfaction.
Eis'tern glanced up at the targeting holo. "Wish you could say that
about the Alliance," he said. "It looks like they're coming after
us.
We're not ready to fight this ship, you know."
"We will be gone before they catch up," said Sorannan.
"They don't know what's happening here. Maybe they wouldn't even
bother with us if they did."
"I intend to tell them, but not for that reason," said Sorannan. "I
want them to know who they owe their victory to."
He climbed back to his station, pulled out a pair of system boards, and
replaced them upside down. The monitors flickered as the displays
changed to reflect the new functions being controlled from that
location.
"General A'baht, can you hear this transmission?"
"This is A'baht." There was curiosity in the tone.
"Please identify yourself."
"Proudly, General. This is Major Sil Sorannan of the Black Sword
Command, Imperial Navy--acting captain of the Star Destroyer
Intimidator and commodore of the Camp Pa'aal Squadron."
"I am not familiar with your unit, Major."
Sorannan laughed stiffly. "It's newly commissioned, General--sorry you
couldn't be here for the christening."
"If your intentions are not hostile---" "It is not that we have any
more love for you now than when we last faced you," said Sorannan.
"But we won't fight to defend our enslavers."
"Heave to, and you won't be harmed."
"Oh, no," Sorannan said. "We've been here too long already--nearly
thirteen years on a nine-month detail.
No, General. This is good-bye. We are taking back what is ours,
starting with our freedom and these ships.
We leave the Yevetha to you."
He pressed the middle and third buttons on the wand, and an unjammable
hypercomm signal leaped across the emptiness to slave circuits buried
deep in the command architecture of every Imperial warship de ployed at
N'zoth and its daugher worlds across the cluster.
Autopilots calculated jump vectors, and hyperdrive motivators called on
the immense power of solar ionization reactors. Space trembled,
twisted, and yawned open around the accelerating warships.
Moments later, Black Sword Command's withdrawal from Koornacht Cluster
was finally complete.
Cheering broke out on the bridge of Intrepid as the heart of the
Yevethan fleet vanished from the tracking displays, but A'baht quickly
put a stop to it.
"We have no way of verifying what we just heard.
Those ships could jump out half a light-year and return on our flank,"
he said. "Moreover, there are still forty-four T-types out there, and
none of them have broken off yet. This is not over."
There was very little time left before the fragmented Yevethan
formation and the New Republic fleet met.
A'baht used most of it to broadcast another appeal for surrender,
directing it at the individual captains of the approaching vessels,
emphasizing the superior numbers of his force.
But there was no reply, and no change in the Yevethan fleet's
disposition. Whatever orders Nil Spaar had given before disappearing
were apparently still in force. That, more than anything, convinced
A'baht that they had not seen the last of the Imperial contingent.
"I cannot believe that a unit that has been decimated-no, worse than
that--before the battle begins, which has lost its senior commanders
before a shot has been fired, and which faces a vastly superior force,
would not collapse," the general said. "By all manner of reason, those
commanders should be thinking of surrender or retreat."
"Well, they're not," said Colonel Corgan. "Targets eighteen, twenty,
and twenty-one just opened fire on the phantom elements of Task Force
Token."
"So I am led to conclude that none of those things
has happened," said A'baht. "Their force has not been decimated, only
divided. Their command structure remains intact--and they have other
forces not yet committed to the battle zone. Therefore We can infer
that these are low-value assets meant to occupy us, to disrupt our
formations, and to soften us up for a planned counterstrike."
"I concur that the evidence can be read that way," said Colonel
Corgan.
"So how do we play it now, General?"
A'baht studied the tactical display. "We must neutralize this force
without compromising our unit integrity or our mobility," he said at
last. "Pass the word as follows: Hold back the bombers. Keep the
patrol screens close, and launch the A-wing interceptors only in
response to direct threat from other little birds. Our operational
unit for this engagement is to be the fleet squadron, and squadron
commanders now have operational autonomy. All units, pursue, engage,
and destroy all targets of opportunity. Since they insist on a fight,
we'll give 'em one."
"What about the hostages, sir?"
A'baht shook his head. "Pray for them, Colonel.
That's all we can do."
A great conflict is nothing more than the aggregate of many small
struggles, and so it was with the Battle of N'zoth. There was no
single vantage point from which its entirety could be grasped not even
the observation deck of the New Republic flagship.
Luke and Akanah had turned away the lieutenant who came to remove them
from that spot. The commencement of hostilities had not meant the end
of Wialu's efforts--to Luke's surprise, she continued the illusion of
the phantom warships even as ion and laser cannon began to light up
space all around them.
even if the Yevetha did not surrender," Akanah whispered.
Luke nodded. "If the phantoms draw their share of the Yevethan fire--"
"She said that no one would die aboard a ship that wasn't there."
But it was obvious to both of them that the effort was taking a toll on
Wialu. As the battle wore on and broken and burning warships began to
dot the starry backdrop, Wialu began to sag visibly. Finally, moments
after a New Republic light escort blew up spectacularly just a few
kilometers away, Wialu slumped forward on the deck where she had been
sitting, and the phantoms vanished from the New Republic formations.
Even then, she surprised Luke again by declining to be helped from the
observation deck.
"I will watch to the end. No matter what path you follow, it is
important to be reminded what war means," she said, letting Akanah
guide her to one of the empty semireclined chairs.
Luke had been holding a question for hours, and the urgency of it had
grown in the waiting. He crouched beside Wialu, his back to the
fighting.
"Wialu, I have to know--are there Fallanassi aboard any of those
vessels?"
"Yes," she said.
He drew a deep breath and released it slowly. "Is Nashira among
them?"
"I cannot hear your question," Wialu said.
His frustration sharpened to the point of pain, Luke turned angrily
away.
"I can tell you only that they are not hostages," she went on. "They
chose this service for themselves, on the last morning that the Current
scalded as it does now--the day the Yevetha came to make their claim.
Many, many died that day. But some were saved by those who placed
themselves between. I did not ask it of them, but I honor them and
their sacrifice."
Staring out at a burning Yevethan thrustship, Luke found he had no
choice but to respect that sacrifice with silence.
In reality, the outcome of the Battle of N'zoth had been foreordained
from the moment Sil Sorannan departed with the Black Sword vessels.
But it was no less brutal or difficult for that. The Yevethan
thrustship shields were superior to New Republic shields, and the
spherical symmetry of the thrust-ship design made them even more
effective. And though they were not heavily armed by Imperial
standards--the combined output of the eight batteries was less than
that of a gunship, to say nothing of an escort or a heavy cruiser--the
ability to focus all of that energy on one small area gave them the
knockout punch of a much larger ship.
Under attack by three and four New Republic vessels each, one after
another of the Yevethan warships succumbed. But it was a war of
attrition, with nearly as many losses as there were
victories--Thunderhead.
Aboukir. Fulminant. Werra. Garland. Banshee.
Nor were all of the losses among the smaller vessels.
Commodore Farley Carson's Yakez was caught between two thrustships and
broken in two by the detonation of the forward magazine after its bow
shields collapsed. The fleet carrier Ballarat took a brace of Yevethan
missiles just forward of the number four flight deck, and the chain of
explosions that followed hurled three squadrons of shattered E- and
X-wings out into space.
Ballarat's misfortune gave Plat Mallar his first chance to do something
more than watch from the yawning maw of a flight deck. All of the
fleet's launches, gigs, and shuttles had been outfitted for rescue and
recovery work and distributed among the task forces.
Mallar and his shuttle had been assigned to the cruiser Mandjur, which
was part of Ballarat's squadron and the closest vessel to it when the
missiles struck. While Mandjur dueled with the Yevethan warship,
Mallar brought back one live pilot and two dead ones in three trips
through an intense field of fire.
But despite the painful losses scattered across the entire battle zone,
the trend was clear.
There were only two points at which that trend threatened to reverse
itself. The first was when the phantoms vanished, allowing the
Yevethan ships to focus their fire on the real threats. The second
came near the end, when the last eleven thrustships began launching
their trifoil fighters--fighters that screamed toward the New Republic
vessels, diving through shield gaps opened for them by the Yevethan
batteries and hurling themselves against their targets as suicide
missiles.
In a matter of only five minutes, half a dozen of the vessels engaging
the remnant of the Yevethan fleet were either destroyed or forced to
withdraw. Mandjur was among the ships that came to fill the gaps, but
it was struck twice near the stern before it could launch even half of
its interceptors. It began to drift, crippled and vulnerable, its
engines dead and its aft shields gone.
In the moments after the twin impacts rattled the cruiser, Mallar ran
to join a group of pilots, deck crew, and droids who were trying to
clear a damaged E-wing from the mouth of the flight deck. Their
chatter told him what was happening outside the ship and decided his
course.
Ever since coming aboard Mandjur, he had been eyeing Captain Tegett's
X-wing. Painted a vivid red, it sat in a reserved tie-down slot under
the broad transparencies of the flight control office. And when the
debris was finally cleared and the undamaged interceptors began to move
forward to launch, Mallar ran to the red X-wing instead of back to his
shuttle.
When the flight operations chief cleared him to start engines instead
of trying to chase him away, Mallar knew just how dire the ship's
plight was. Using the power of his ship's signature appearance, he
edged into line between two E-wings, and not long after got the green
ball to launch.
"Four coming in!" Mallar heard over his cockpit comm as Mandjur fell
away behind him. "This is Blue Five--I need help back here!"
Hauling the X-wing around sharply toward the cruiser's stern, Mallar
had a moment of dizziness. He
heard Ackbar's voice echoing in his thoughts. Don't try to turn with
them--use your speed, know your strengths and your limits. He saw
Polneye burning before his eyes.
Thanks for the lessons, Admiral, he thought. Thanks for the chance.
As Mallar thumbed the squawk button he saw an E-wing turning with him
and another coming up from behind to settle on his starboard wing.
"This is Red Leader," he said with quiet confidence. "On my way, Blue
Five, with company. Take the first one---we'll get the rest."
Then he pushed the throttles ahead, and the fighter leaped forward with
an eagerness that matched his own.
The reports that came in from the intelligence sources scattered
through the outer regions of the cluster all mirrored each other: The
ships that had been orbiting the destroyed colonies were gone. Asset
analysis would later show that those same ships were among those that
had reinforced the fleets at N'zoth, Wakiza, Z'fell
, and the other
large-population worlds.
The reports that came in from the task forces sent to those worlds
mirrored the experience at N'zoth: The Imperial ships turned and jumped
out without apparent cause or explanation, but not a single Yevethan
vessel surrendered or fled. Every last thrustship had fought
relentlessly, taking the fight to the Fleet as the aggressor, until it
was destroyed.
A'baht had never seen the like of it in thirty years of soldiering, and
it left him shaken.
"It has always been enough, in the past, to defeat the enemy," he said
to Morano in the privacy of the now-quiet situation room. "I've never
known an enemy who forced me to utterly destroy him. By the end, I was
looking for ways not to have to destroy those last few ships. If they
had given me any chance to spare them, shown any hesitation, even just
broken contact and fallen back--" "They never gave us a Chance," said
Morano, shak ing his head. "You can't show mercy to someone who's
going for your throat."
"No," A'baht said.
Tapping a key slowly with his index finger. A'baht began paging
through the casualty summaries. It took a long time. "This is an
error," he said, pausing at one point. "Tegett never left Mandjur--it
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