by James Luceno
Han clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, buddy! You’re the greatest!”
“Thanks for what?”
He turned his grin all the way on. “Ackbar swore if I didn’t talk you into this, he was gonna make me do it. Han Solo and the Rapid Response Task Force just doesn’t have the right ring, you know?”
“Here is Mindor’s effective gravitic radius.” Commander Thavish, the task force’s intelligence coordinator, was the next-youngest guy in the room, and he had five years on Han, let alone Luke. He keyed his thumbstick, and the pinpoint of Mindor grew into a sphere roughly a decimeter in diameter. “Standard englobement puts our Double Sevens here.”
Three new pinpoints formed an equilateral triangle around the planet, roughly parallel to the system’s plane of the ecliptic. The fourth and fifth pinpoints appeared above and below the plane. The five Double Sevens were the strike force’s entire complement of CC-7700/E interdiction cruisers, each capable of projecting a simulated gravity well out to several hundred planetary diameters. When Thavish triggered the representations of the DS’s gravitic influence, the overlapping spheres of effect filled an area roughly five light-minutes across—about ninety million kilometers—in which hyperdrives simply would not function.
“While the E series’ weapons upgrades give the Double Sevens substantial point-defense capability, each of them will require a full squadron fighter screen, because we just don’t have adequate intel on target forces. We could find ourselves facing anything from a few dozen to several thousand of those TIE defenders; the records captured during the Spirana operation indicate that there are still over ten thousand verified-production defenders unaccounted for. Plus, of course, we can’t say for certain that the remaining loyalist territories contain no active production facilities. Not to mention that he might have interceptors or other non-FTL fighters based in-system.”
Captain Trent, commander of the Regulator, leaned closer. “And capital ships?”
“Shadowspawn’s forces have never employed capital ships.”
“Doesn’t mean he ain’t got any.”
“Yes, sir. But there are elements of the system that suggest we will be facing primarily starfighters. It’s just that there’s no way to guess how many.”
T’Chttrk chittered and clicked a question. Her D-series protocol droid, D-P4M, inclined its elegantly tungsten-coated head and murmured, “The commander respectfully requests to be informed of any good news.”
“Commander,” Thavish said, “that is the good news.” He manipulated his thumbstick again. “The bad news looks like this.”
The translucent clouds that had drifted through the simulation thickened as though they could become actually tangible. “These represent our best long-range scans of the debris field from the destruction of Taspan II. The Big Crush, as it is called, resulted from an accident at an Imperial testing facility for a new type of gravity-well projector. The planet was entirely pulverized, producing debris that ranges from pinhole micrometeors to asteroids several kilometers in diameter. This occurred only four Standard years ago; the debris has not yet settled into stable orbits. Worse, the planets were in conjunction at the time of the Big Crush, and Mindor was the inner planet of the two. So as the chunks of Taspan II spiral inward toward the star, Mindor’s own gravity has captured great masses of them into eccentric, unstable orbits around itself.”
Admiral Kalback leaned forward, chin palps twitching. “And there is no way to plot these orbits?”
“Commander, even if we could scan them all—which we can’t—no computer could reliably plot their paths; even the word orbit, I’m afraid, suggests a much more settled situation than we’ll be facing. They are constantly interacting with each other in every conceivable way, from gravitic effects to outright collision. If you’ll direct your attention to these figures—”
Each individual cloud now sported glowing numbers that drifted right along with them. The numbers slowly changed, creeping up or down; when clouds drifted together, the overlap zones produced numbers of their own—higher ones. “These numbers represent our best estimates of the material density of each major debris cloud. Each figure reflects the number of tactically significant objects per cubic kilometer. By tactically significant, we mean large enough to produce substantial damage to a fleet ship, in spite of defensive fire and particle shielding.”
Captain Patrell, the grizzled Corellian commander of the Wait a Minute, swore harshly enough that at least four of the other officers flinched. “Some of those numbers are in the hundreds!”
“Yes, sir.”
The captains exchanged grim looks. The prospect of bringing cruisers that were themselves a respectable fraction of a cubic kilometer into that kind of asteroid storm was bleak.
“Let me put this another way.” Another twist on the thumbstick produced new figures in the clouds. “These new numbers represent the estimated probability of catastrophic impact—one that results in significant degradation of combat function and crew.”
Luke let his eyes drift shut. “Significant degradation of combat function. That means people dying, doesn’t it? Ships crippled or destroyed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then say so.”
“Sir?”
“That’s an order, Thavish. No euphemisms.” He reflected sadly that five years ago, he hadn’t known, really, what people dying meant—his first real taste of that had been the charred corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, leaking smoke up into the Tatooine twilight …
He’d learned a lot since then. Not all of it was about being a Jedi.
“Yes, sir. Um, is this a Jedi thing, sir?”
“No,” Luke said. “It’s a General Skywalker thing. When you talk about someone as a set of degradable capabilities instead of a person, it’s too easy to think about him that way, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Thavish turned back to the holoimage. “We used the Double Sevens as our baseline, as they’re roughly median size for the task force. A DS at this point, for example, will have a one point eight five percentage chance of a catastrophic impact—”
“That’s less than one in fifty!” Captain Patrell shook his head, chuckling. “For a minute, you had me scared!”
Luke said, eyes still closed, “What’s the time frame?”
“Sir?”
“One point eight five percent in how long?”
“Oh, yes. That percentage chance is on, well, on insertion. That is, uh, instantly.”
Captain Patrell stopped chuckling.
Luke nodded. “And after that?”
“Well—the statistical modeling is complex. It’s a sliding scale, more or less; assuming you’re not instantly, uh, destroyed, we have to calculate the—”
“Let’s say, an hour.”
When the numbers came up, the expressions got even more grim. After one hour, the probability was running over twenty percent. “So, basically,” Luke murmured, “you’re telling us that one hour into this operation, we’ll have lost two ships. If the enemy does nothing at all.”
“Well, the math is a bit more complicated than—”
“Basically.”
Thavish nodded apologetically. “Basically. Yes.”
“It’s a graveyard,” Patrell said. “It’s where capital ships go to die.”
“The Taspan system,” Thavish said, “is an almost perfect starfighter base. In a starfighter, you’re not only a smaller target for the asteroids, but you’re maneuverable enough to dodge them. But to hold Shadowspawn there, we need the interdictors. Otherwise his entire force can simply vanish into hyperspace. But our interdictors are so vulnerable we can’t afford to bring them in.”
“Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke murmured. “Not a stupid man. He knew what he was doing when he picked Mindor.”
He looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, wishing mightily that he could steal an hour or two to rest and meditate and try to summon some of that Jedi insight he was supposed to have, but there just wasn’t time. If
only Ben—or Master Yoda, or even his father—would phase in right now with a word of wisdom … but whatever parts of them remained active in the Force apparently had business elsewhere. Just as they’d had for months now.
No insight from the Force. All he had for insight was his own.
It had better be enough.
He sighed. “Well, we can’t wait them out, and we can’t whittle them down. We can’t even fight a pitched battle. That only leaves one option.”
Admiral Kalback nodded. “Overwhelming force. Shock and awe,” he said.
Commander Thavish tilted his head consideringly. “It might actually save lives, on balance. Ours, at least. Maybe even theirs. If we never give them a chance to think they can fight their way out, they might just surrender.”
“Saving lives is swell, if we can. Winning is more important,” Luke said. “If we let Shadowspawn’s forces escape, they could scatter. Go on the run—break up into small, independent units. We know better than anyone in the galaxy how much damage that kind of decentralized guerrilla insurgency can do—it’s how we brought down the Empire. This might be our last chance to engage Shadowspawn force-on-force.”
Luke looked around the table, meeting each commander’s eyes in turn. “Every one of you needs to understand this. We hold nothing back except a small reserve force, to cover our extraction if things go bad. It’s full commitment. All or nothing.”
One by one, the commanders answered his stare with grim acknowledgment.
“All right,” Luke said. “I want tactical readiness reports within the hour. We move in three.”
CHAPTER 3
Aeona Cantor lay flat on the jagged hilltop, squinting through electrobinoculars that had gone foggy, their front lenses scored by too much exposure to the clouds of windblown grit that passed for atmosphere here on Mindor. The hunks of broken lava around her masked her silhouette, and she didn’t have to worry about thermal imaging, because the rock around her was warmed by the noontime heat, and the jigsaw hunks of lava glued to her survival suit made perfect camouflage against visible-light sensors. All of which were necessary factors in her position, which was less than ten kilometers from a huge smoking volcanic dome.
The fact that this volcanic dome was huge and smoking was of no interest to her at all; she cared only about the double ring of planetary-defense turbolaser towers that surrounded it, and the gnat clouds of TIE fighters that streamed in and out of every visible cavern mouth on the mountainside.
Which was exactly how it had looked every time she’d gotten a glimpse.
She scowled, pushing a lock of burnt-orange hair off her forehead, and dialed the electrobinoculars up to a higher magnification. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Tripp, is he sure about the jammers?”
From a few meters below and behind her, a man who wore a similar outfit of lava-adorned survival suit answered with a shrug. “All I can tell you is what Boakie tells me. Subspace is clear. If we wanted, we could send a signal all the way to the Trigaskian Blur.”
“Why would Shadowspawn turn off his subspace jammers? Right after a raid. Doesn’t make sense.”
“How would I know? Better you should ask him.”
“If I ever get the chance,” she muttered through her teeth, “we’ll have other things to talk about.”
“I got something!” This shout came from farther down the hillside, within the mouth of the cave where the rest of her men waited. “Hey, Aeona! Hey, I got something!”
Aeona flattened herself into the rocks and hissed, “Tripp! Tell that idiot to keep his bloody voice down!”
“What for? It’s not like there’s anybody around to hear.”
“You’re gonna argue with me?”
“Aw, Aeona, come on—”
“The blackshells could have seeded these hills with sonic probes. There might be a ground patrol. Do you know how the Melters keep finding us? Me neither. Till we do, the next guy who speaks above a whisper gets my blaster barrel across the face.”
“Aeona—”
“And the next guy who argues with me is gonna get it up his—”
“All right, all right. Shee, relax, huh?” Tripp let himself half slide, half scramble down the hillside toward the cave.
Aeona jammed the electrobinoculars back against her face. She’d relax when she was long gone from this stinking ball of rock.
From behind her came the scrabble of boots on lava as Tripp worked his way back up the slope. “It was nothin’,” he said.
“What kind of nothing?”
Tripp waved a hand disgustedly. “A nothing kind of nothing. Just a couple pings.”
Aeona’s scowl deepened. “Pings?”
“Yeah—some kind of signal, and an echo, like a transponder response—”
“I know what a ping is,” she said through her teeth. “Where did the initializer come from?”
Tripp shrugged. “Outside the system, prob’ly. A HoloNet repeater or something.”
“And the response came from here?”
“Well, yeah. Um … how’d you know that?”
She was already backing herself out of her position. She scrambled down the slope. “Up! Everybody up!”
People in the lava-glued survival suits scrambled to their feet from all around the little cave.
“Lock and load, people.” Aeona started moving through them toward her scout bike. “I want every speeder, swoop, and skimmer in the air in five. No supplies except weapons, power cells, and medikits. Full alert.”
“Alert?” Tripp said as he scrambled after her. “What’s going on?”
“You think it’s a coincidence that after months, those jammers go down just now? Just in time to let through a transponder ping that’s probably coming from some kind of tracker?”
Tripp frowned. “What, it’s a trap?”
“Not for us. And we need to make sure we don’t step into it.” Aeona pulled her blaster and checked its charge, then spun it around her finger and let it slip smoothly back into her holster. For an instant, she smiled. But only for an instant. “We’ll wait and watch, but we need to be ready to move.”
Group Captain Klick stood stiffly at attention, flight helmet gleaming black beneath his black-armored left arm. Oblivious to the pleas and curses, sobs and occasional screams from the captives in the Sorting Center behind him, he faced a huge slab of durasteel that sealed a starfighter-sized archway carved from the wall of this volcanic cavern. Soon enough, the slab would pull aside, and a Pawn would come to beckon, and Klick would be ushered into the Presence of Lord Shadowspawn.
To suffer the consequences of his failure.
Despite the durasteel gray of his little remaining hair, the deeply weathered creases of his face, and the smear of burn scar that rumpled his cheek and swept upward over the remains of his left ear, when he took off that helmet anyone who knew stormtroopers knew they were looking at something special. Klick was one of the original Fetts, a veteran of the Clone Wars from Geonosis to the Jedi Rebellion, and he was proud of it. This was his sole point of vanity; he never minded the slightly silly sound of his call sign, hung on him by a humor-challenged Jedi Padawan some twenty-five years ago. “Klick” was short for “kilometer,” a reference to his crèche identifier of TP—Trooper Pilot—1000.
The vast cavern around him had been expanded and shaped from the local meltmassif stone before being fusion-formed into a vault of black glass. Its walls and roof glimmered with cold green highlights, reflected from the gently bobbing flock of repulsor lightglobes that floated ten meters above the polished floor. Scattered across this floor were clots of prisoners, standing or sitting or lounging in as much comfort as could be had on the bare cold floor.
The prisoners were a motley group, from beggars to aristocrats, thieves to Rebel officers. These prisoners were the actual targets of the raids Klick’s defender wings had been conducting throughout the Mid Rim these past months, taking three or four here, a half dozen there, never so many that the Rebels might suspect. The
loot taken on these raids—and the destruction left behind—was no more than camouflage, so that these prisoners would be written off by their families, their friends, and their respective planetary governments as missing and presumed dead in the resulting mass slaughter.
So that these prisoners could be permanently disappeared.
Disappeared here, to Mindor. To the Sorting Center of Lord Shadowspawn.
Behind Klick, four or five of the Pawns drifted among the prisoners, hems of their long robes trailing behind them. Here and there a Pawn might stop, the red-limned shadow of his broad crescent headgear falling across this prisoner or that. These Pawns never spoke, and their expressions never changed—couldn’t change, as their faces were only holomasks projected by their Crowns—but sometimes a pale hand would extend from a darkly voluminous sleeve. If the prisoner was lucky, a slicing gesture would bring a quick burst of blasterfire to the back. If the prisoner was less lucky, a long pale finger, laid upon his head, would indicate that this prisoner had been elected to the Pawns.
From the sudden whine of a neural stunner in the cavern behind him, Klick judged that another captive had just been so elected. Sure enough: shortly a pair of Pawns approached, dragging between them an unconscious human youth of fifteen or sixteen Standard years. The slab of durasteel retreated, then slid silently aside, revealing the fusion-formed corridor beyond. Klick remained at attention, without the slightest flicker of expression, as the Pawns dragged the youth past him, through the archway and down the corridor.
He had been waiting, at attention, ever since the defender wing of his starfighter group had limped home from its disastrous attack on the false Corellian Queen. He was fully prepared to wait all day. All the next, too. If necessary, Klick was willing to wait all week.
This was not from fear of Shadowspawn’s anger; the Lord of the Shadow Throne was no lunatic like the assassin Vader, to slaughter a loyal subordinate in a fit of pique. What held Klick in place was nothing more nor less than a passionate desire to be worthy of the trust Shadowspawn had placed in him. If doing so would help advance the Great Cause, Klick would stand at attention until he starved to death.
