The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “However, despite their good choices, the GA has made some poor ones, too. Situating several starfighter squadrons and some planet-landable fighting vessels around their command post as a show of strength gives us more things to destroy—explosively, catastrophically, and most important, recordably—when we do hit that site.”

  “This is bad, bad, bad,” Han said. He couldn’t keep an edge of anger out of his voice.

  The wire-grid shield indicators began blinking more erratically. “In the first part of our operation,” the admiral continued, “teams of commandos will be infiltrated into Rellidir. They will attempt to reach the shield generators and destroy them with high explosives. Success on their part is to be considered a bonus to our plan, but the plan does not rely on it.”

  “Who came up with this plan?” Han didn’t speak loudly enough to be heard down on the floor or in adjacent observation chambers, but his voice was rising. “See-Threepio could have done better. This is exactly what the GA is going to be expecting.”

  He could see Leia tense. It couldn’t be in response to his anger; she was used to that. She had to be growing unhappier because she suspected the plan was going to get even worse.

  On the upside-down view of Rellidir, half a dozen green dots appeared at various points along the view’s rim and sped toward the enemy command post, each followed by a stream of red dots.

  “In the second part of the operation,” the admiral continued, “Corellian YT-Fifty-one-hundred Shriek-class bombers will assault the shielded region from all sides, closely pursued by Galactic Alliance starfighters and warships. They will bombard the shields, if any survive, and then continue their bombardment of the command post until it is destroyed.”

  The admiral mopped her brow with her sleeve. Her voice turned pained. “The Shriek-class bombers have been chosen because they are distinctly, uniquely, unmistakably Corellian. Designed by the Corellian Engineering Corporation, they have not entered full production yet—only ten late-model prototypes and a few earlier prototypes are in existence.” The city view abruptly winked out of existence and was replaced by a slowly spinning view of a sleek gray saucer shape with forward-projecting mandible, like a streamlined Millennium Falcon without the side-mounted cockpit projection.

  “The pursuing spacecraft,” Karathas continued, “though bearing the colors and insignia of vehicles and vessels of the Galactic Alliance fleet, will actually be units of the Corellian Defense Force. Instead of shooting down the Shrieks, other than hitting them with a few reduced-strength laser blasts for cosmetic effect, their mission will be to reinforce the firepower of those bombers … and to reassign blame for civilian deaths to the Galactic Alliance.”

  Silence fell in the wake of the admiral’s words. Leia put her face into her hands—not an expression of grief, but a way to keep her composure. Han took a long, deep breath. It had gotten worse.

  Wedge turned a brilliant, bitter smile on the admiral. “It would seem,” he said, “that the plan would actually benefit if we maximized civilian casualties.”

  Leia lifted her head, her eyes wide.

  Admiral Karathas’s face relaxed into a nonexpression, as though she’d just been hit by a blaster set to stun. “General Antilles, that might be the most callous thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  Wedge looked scornful and made a dismissive gesture. “Admiral, let’s call a skifter a skifter. Operation Noble Savage is, as you yourself said, designed to take what is inevitably going to be a public relations nightmare—the deaths of thousands of civilians from friendly fire—and turn it to the advantage of the Corellian independence cause. It will take outrage that would have been directed against us and turn it against our opponents. That outrage will stiffen Corellian resistance against the GA, allowing us to hit harder, more ferociously. By an inevitable progression of logic, the more horrible the offense we can blame on the GA forces, the greater that outrage. Correct?”

  Karathas blinked. Finally, her face resumed the hard angles and planes that had characterized it for most of her adulthood. “General, I’m within seconds of ordering you to shut up and leave this council.”

  “That would be a mistake,” Wedge said. His voice was as hard as Karathas’s had become. “If you did that, you’d prevent me from showing you how to achieve your military objectives without wantonly killing fellow Corellians. And let me point out that Operation Noble Savage, though it would probably divert the population’s outrage from our military to the GA, drastically increases the odds that we will go to war—our population wouldn’t easily back away from further confrontations if all those lives on Tralus remained unavenged, would it?”

  Karathas paused. The respect with which most Corellian military officers held Antilles, and the admiral’s own evident discontent with the plan just outlined, obviously kept in check any outrage she might have felt at being addressed in that fashion. Leia felt only so much sympathy for the woman, however. Karathas had bought into a plan that was ghastly. Leia would have had far more respect for her had some other officer, Karathas’s replacement, been explaining this mission—meaning that Karathas had been replaced for her opposition to Noble Savage.

  A square of light fell across the table as another of the observation rooms was illuminated from within; its occupant had obviously turned on its interior light so as to be seen from below. Han and Leia looked around the bank of observation booths, but none they could see was now illuminated, meaning that the one they were looking for had to be close to theirs.

  Then a voice, electronically amplified, boomed from the room just to their left. “General, am I to understand that the operation I helped design, that I approved and am ready to set into motion, is wanton?”

  Leia winced, and Han felt like drawing his blaster. That cutting voice was distinctive, instantly recognizable. It was Thrackan Sal-Solo. Han also felt a little foolish. Of course the Corellian Chief of State would have a viewing chamber near the Five World Prime Minister’s; of course Thrackan would be here to observe this meeting.

  Han glanced to the left, toward the source of Thrackan’s voice. On the other side of a thin wall was a man who’d given him grief across decades. He whispered, “It’s sort of like being a kid again. Hiding in your bed because there’s a monster in the closet.”

  Despite herself, Leia grinned.

  Han mimed drawing his blaster and aiming it at the wall to his left. He wondered how many shots it would take for him to hit Thrackan under these circumstances, and whether he and Leia could get out of the building afterward.

  It was probably not wise to try. Not this time. He sighed and mimed reholstering his weapon.

  Wedge turned to face Sal-Solo’s viewport, meaning he was staring almost directly up into Han and Leia’s, as well. “No, sir,” he said. “As I’m sure your protocol droid is now telling you, my use of the word wanton referred to the unnecessary deaths of so many of our kinfolk and fellow citizens. And there’s the additional factor that, while this group might be able to maintain for years the terrible secret that we were responsible for those deaths, we wouldn’t be able to keep it forever. Secrets, like hydraulic fluids, have a nasty habit of seeping out into the open just when it’s worst for everybody.”

  Sal-Solo’s voice boomed again: “Was that a threat, Antilles?”

  Wedge made a dismissive gesture Han knew would have to outrage Sal-Solo. “No, it was a realistic appraisal. And my realistic appraisal of Operation Noble Savage suggests to me that it would be effective, in that it would probably succeed … but that it would not be efficient. To be efficient, it would have to accomplish our goals with minimal loss of civilian life, and with a chance to reduce, instead of increase, our chance to enter a full-scale shooting war.”

  “And can you do all that, General? And put a shine on your reputation while you’re at it?”

  “I can. And put a shine on your reputation. Since you’re the military commander in chief approving an operation that might not rid the system of scores of thousands of lo
yal Corellians.”

  Han saw Leia holding her breath. Wedge was playing a tricky game here—appealing to Sal-Solo’s political instincts of self-preservation, but still batting the man’s words back into his teeth. Perhaps Wedge was getting too tired to keep his politics soft-spoken and pleasing. Perhaps, like Han, he hated Sal-Solo so much that he simply couldn’t bear to accommodate the man.

  “Let’s hear it,” Sal-Solo said. “If I like what I hear, you might not find yourself begging on a street corner come morning.”

  Wedge turned his back on the man’s booth. From a breast pocket he removed a datapad. Looking around, he apparently spotted the room’s hologram input sensor; he pointed the datapad at it, and abruptly the hologram image overhead changed.

  Once again it was the center of Rellidir, but a less realistic plotting of it; the spacescrapers were all simple gray rectangles, their windows, balconies, and decorations not represented. A moment after the hologram resolved into crisp detail, dome-like translucences in pink appeared to show the two sets of shields maintained by the Galactic Alliance occupiers.

  “Same problem, different solution,” Wedge said. On the hologram, two flights of green blips—six blips per flight, two half squadrons—appeared at the edges of the displayed region, the first from one angle, and the second from an angle ninety degrees to that of the first. The first flight overflew the shield-protected region; a moment later, the second flight followed suit. Now red dots appeared on the display, in numbers rapidly swelling from twenty to a hundred, and formed up to follow the green dots. Both the pursued and the pursuers exited the scene within moments.

  “Stage One,” Wedge continued, “is a diversionary bombing run on the shields, standard operational procedure to overload shields and bring them down. Given that the GA occupiers have not only installed military power generators at the site but also commandeered city power generators and can feed them straight into their shields, the shields possess a lot of power. This run will fail, and the bombers will make a quick bounce up to orbit, drawing off a certain amount of pursuit.”

  Wedge tapped another button on his datapad. Just barely within the outer perimeter of the shields, a massive gray building began to blink in color, alternating between green and yellow. “This is the Terkury Housing Complex, currently under construction, being built on the site of an old complex that had to be deconstructed for safety reasons. The new complex will be somewhat more upscale than many of the surrounding housing units, providing modern amenities and a broad underground hangar area for private skimmers shuttles, and the like.”

  Sal-Solo’s voice was richly mocking. “You almost make me want to live there.”

  “At the moment, sir, it’s not a very good investment. Stage Two of this operation involves taking a couple of those Shriek-class bombers and flying them clean through the Terkury Housing Complex, then continuing on to the arts center and initiating its destruction.”

  Sal-Solo cleared his throat, the electronically augmented sound echoing off the chamber’s walls. “Surely, given your reputation for military strategy, you’ve noticed that the housing complex you propose to fly through is enclosed within their shields.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you don’t see this as a problem.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m familiar with the payload that a Shriek bomber can carry, and it seems to me that two of them would not be able to carry enough ordnance to punch through two rings of shields and then destroy the shield generators themselves.”

  “That’s correct, sir. I’ve compensated for that factor by planning for the Shrieks to be carrying almost no ordnance at all.”

  There was a long pause before Sal-Solo replied, and Han could imagine the man standing there, his expression pained, no words emerging. Finally Sal-Solo said, “You’re right on the verge of that street corner I was mentioning, Antilles.”

  Wedge glanced over his shoulder up at Sal-Solo, an amused expression that all but said, You shouldn’t interrupt when grown-ups are talking. He raised his datapad and thumbed another button. The angle of the schematic changed, dropping the point of view until it was oriented mere meters over a broad thoroughfare; at the far end of the thoroughfare was the blinking green-and-yellow building.

  “I mentioned,” Wedge said, “the housing complex’s broad underground hangar.” The hologram’s point of view went into motion, traveling toward the blinking building at a high rate of speed. “Here you can see a simulation of the Shriek bombers’ approach toward the housing complex. When they get to the distance of a few blocks, they release some of their ordnance—” Blue dotted lines leapt forward toward the blinking building, but dropped at the last moment to strike the thoroughfare just ahead of it. “—and blow a broad hole in the avenue, straight down into the hangar area. They fly through the hangar, blowing out an exit ahead of them, and emerge through that hole on the far side, then continue on to their target.

  “As they approach their target, they release their payload of targeter droids, rather crude droids used by our armed forces to teach sharpshooting and ballistics. Those droids use laser range finders and other sensors to paint their target, defining not just the command center but a precise point on its shielding.”

  “And then?” Finally, Sal-Solo sounded interested rather than mocking.

  “And then the hundreds of missiles fired in the wake of the two Shrieks, following the telemetry sent by those targeter droids, come pouring out of the hangar bay, hit that point on the shields, overload them until they fail, and continue on to hit the command post, plus the vehicles and vessels on the ground, surgically eradicating them.”

  “They could still overfly their target,” Admiral Karathas said.

  Wedge nodded. “As surgical as we’d like for this operation to be, we can’t eliminate all risk of friendly-fire fatalities. Believe me, I’d love to. But one thing we can do is have the targeter droids make their target the summit of the enemy shields, then the summit of the command post building. We can program our missiles to go as high as possible once they exit the hangar, then dive on their target from above. The likelihood of them shooting past a target and hitting the side of an occupied building is thereby reduced.”

  “Let me make sure I understand,” Sal-Solo said. “Your two Shriek bombers—they’ll be sustaining fire from any GA defenses not drawn off by our diversion.”

  “Correct,” Wedge said.

  “That means gunships, starfighters, antispacecraft gun emplacements, and who knows what else.”

  “Correct.”

  “How do they do this?”

  “Well,” Wedge said, “first, the performance characteristics of the Shrieks are known to the GA government, but since the bombers aren’t in production yet, that information hasn’t been widely distributed. It’s not likely to be in the databases of the GA forces around Tralus. This means the defenders won’t know exactly what to expect from these machines. Second, the fact that the assault force seems inadequate to the task means the forces arrayed against the Shrieks will probably not be overwhelming. And third, I plan to choose—assuming I’m selected to implement this plan, otherwise I’ll just recommend—pilots who are especially well suited to this sort of mission. I don’t mean the pilots who’ve been testing the Shrieks, good men and women though they are. I mean canny old veterans who have decades of experience with YT-series spacecraft. Pilots familiar with terrain-following assaults and other seemingly suicidal flying techniques.”

  Han leaned farther forward, almost pressing his forehead against the transparisteel, his attention fixed on Wedge. He heard Leia whisper, “Oh, no.”

  Thrackan, sounding cheerful, boomed, “Admiral Karathas, I think this plan deserves close scrutiny …”

  chapter twenty-four

  KUAT SYSTEM, TORYAZ STATION

  Jacen sat in the rolling chair with his feet up on the desk before him. He knew that the image he was holocasting would show his boot soles up clos
e, the rest of his seated body at a slightly greater distance, and then Ben, solemnly standing behind his chair. “A what?” he asked.

  The three-dimensional image of an old Twi’lek male, his skin a wrinkled desert tan, his head-tails wrapped artistically around his neck, was less than a meter tall and situated atop the center of the desk. It was large enough for Jacen to make out the Twi’lek’s expression, one of merry amusement. “It’s a thought,” the Twi’lek said. “An idea.”

  Jacen held the grouping of tassels up before him and studied it. “All of it?”

  The Twi’lek’s head-tails twitched, then he apparently realized that he wasn’t speaking to another of his own kind and indulged in a cruder, broader gesture—a shrug. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I can only speak for the one at the very bottom.”

  Jacen examined that tassel in greater detail. It was composed of six separate braids of tan and red beads, each one knotted intricately. “How is it a thought?”

  “It’s like writing,” the Twi’lek said. “A pattern of knots so individualized, so specific that they can carry thoughts the way writing does. I actually had to take the highest-detail holocam scan you sent me of it and run it through a sculpture interpreter, generating a three-dimensional replica in a flexible material, before I could interpret it. It must be held, manipulated by touch, in order for its meaning to become clear.”

  “And its meaning is what?”

  “As close as I can translate it into Basic, it means, ‘He will strengthen himself through pain.’ ” Jacen gave the Twi’lek a close look. “You look startled, Master Solo.”

  Jacen shook his head. “I’m not a Master, just a Jedi Knight, For’ali. I apologize if I’ve led you to believe that you’re speaking with a social equal.”