“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “If there’s a flood, we’ll have a few moments’ warning. You just whip out your lightsabers and cut a hole in the pipe.”
“Can you whip out your lightsaber, Kolir?” Valin made his whisper loud enough to carry to the ears of the Bothan, who crawled before him. All he could see of her were her black-clad feet and lower legs, barely discernible in the light from the glow rod tucked behind his ear.
Her voice, a low growl, floated back to him: “Quiet, you.”
“Just asking. Polite conversation. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“No!”
“Because that would account for your irritability.”
“So would hunger. And you’re beginning to sound a lot like red meat.”
“When we’re done here, I’d be happy to treat you to dinner.”
“Sons of famous fathers do have to try harder, to compensate.”
Valin grinned. At least she could banter.
He heard a familiar buzzing noise from ahead and stopped to listen. Yes, it was a lightsaber, but not being used in haste. Kolir stopped, too. The buzz went on for nearly a minute, then ceased.
Kolir finally passed back the news. “Seha reached a new obstacle, a metal grate. She was using her lightsaber to cut through it.”
“Her lightsaber, which I suppose she dropped, and now she needs to borrow one.”
Very distantly, he heard Seha’s voice: “I heard that.” Then Kolir was crawling forward again, and Valin followed.
Moments later he wriggled out through the newly opened, still-warm end of the tube and dropped lightly to a duracrete floor two meters down. Here, too, there were no working glow rods, but at least he could stand upright. He stood aside to let Mithric drop beside him.
Valin glanced around. The others had smudges of grease and filth on their faces. Kolir’s tan fur was matted and encrusted in places. Mithric’s ponytail had a spherical, six-legged bug climbing through it. Valin assumed he himself looked equally unappetizing.
Seha, the least filthy of them, glanced around to get her bearings. “We’re inside the second security zone, under the plaza approach to the Senate Building.” She pointed in the general direction the pipe end faced. “That way is toward the Senate Building. If we keep going, we run into the innermost ring of security, the thickest concentration of sensors. It’s not that they’re especially hard to get past individually—just that there are so many, with overlapping coverages, that it’s practically impossible to disable them all or get through them undetected. It could be done, but even someone with much better skills than mine would take weeks to do it.”
Master Katarn nodded as if satisfied. “Staging from here will be fine. Though it would be better if we had several lines of sight and firing positions.”
Seha gestured forward and up, toward a dark vertical shaft accessed by durasteel rungs inset into the permacrete. “That’s the closest one. There will be a sensor at the access hatch, but we can disable it. I can take you laterally to three or four similar spots, each with a view of the front entrance.”
Katarn considered. “I need to have the position closest to Colonel Solo’s usual approach to the building. We’ll spread out among all the accesses. Seha, I want every one of us to be able to find our way back to this spot by touch. And this will be your station, too. Your job is to stay alive, stay here, and get us all out, regardless of whether the mission is a success or a catastrophic failure.”
Seha nodded, clearly intimidated by the responsibility placed on her.
chapter nine
COMMENOR
At times like this, Lieutenant Caregg Oldathan wondered who creaked more—himself, or the aging K-wing assault starfighter he flew. Both of them had been recalled from honorable retirement to active duty when the civil war had begun, and both were in dire need of maintenance and rest.
Not that they were likely to get any today. Rising through high planetary orbit to the engagement zone, where Alliance ships were once again arriving to assault planetary defense forces, he shook his head and offered up a near-silent curse. The Alliance units being brought to bear against them were not enough to crack Commenor’s defenses, but were sufficient to keep them from being deployed to other theaters of war. They were enough to wear those forces down over time, and Oldathan was certain they were doing their job.
“One minute to contact,” he said. “Weapons check.”
“Lasers in the green.” That was the voice of Lieutenant Danen, his bombardier-gunner for this mission. He occupied the starboard cockpit of the vehicle’s dual-cockpit arrangement. “Bangers report operable.”
Bangers were, in Commenori military parlance, concussion missiles, and this K-wing’s hardpoint attachments were laden with them. Oldathan would have preferred boomers, or proton torpedoes—his starfighter’s primary mission was to prey on capital ships—but at this point in the conflict they were in short supply.
The next voice over the comm board was not Danen’s but that of their flight controller, operating from a sensor station on the ground. “Grayfeather Squadron, report.”
Oldathan frowned. “Grayfeather One here.”
“Divert to heading one-eight-oh immediately. We’re picking up an intermittent blip that suggests a vessel approaching on the night side, but we can’t get a fix on it. Coordinates should be on your sensor board now.”
Oldathan glanced at his sensor board and saw a broad green dot over equatorial Commenor a few thousand kilometers to the west, which marked the start of their new search zone. “Got it. Grayfeathers on the move. Out.” He took a moment to retransmit the coordinates to the other four K-wings in what was left of his squadron, then led them westward.
In atmosphere, the trip would have taken hours, but a high ballistic trajectory like this, outside of atmosphere, would be done in a fraction of the time. Still, Oldathan was twitchy with impatience. The battle zone, where his comrades were fighting and dying, was behind him. This was like running away.
Unless, of course, the phantom blip was indeed some sort of Alliance attack, not just another malfunction of Commenor’s overtaxed planetary defense sensor system.
When they reached the target zone, they found it empty of airborne traffic except for one ground-based courier shuttle sprinting off into space, its crew hoping to get clear of the planet’s gravity well and enter hyperspace before Alliance forces detected and intercepted it. Nothing else showed up on sensors.
Oldathan shook his head, annoyed. “Another monkey-lizard chase. All right. Two and Three, head spinward a hundred clicks. Four and Five, anti-spinward. Begin spiral patterns outward. I’ll stay here and do the same. Report all contacts instantly.”
He received four confirmations and saw the two wing pairs peel off to head toward their respective start zones. He felt no undue worry. The shovel-headed, thick-winged starfighters were not particularly fast or elegant, but he knew they could take care of themselves—they were more heavily armed than just about any comparable vehicles the enemy was likely to field.
As he began his own spiral pattern, he tuned in to the general fleet frequency to listen to the battle’s progress. Things weren’t going badly. One enemy frigate had been destroyed, one enemy cruiser had sustained enough damage that it had withdrawn. Starfighter losses were about even between the two sides.
But there were disturbing little signs in the comm transmissions. One rescue shuttle pilot reported, “Have retrieved six friendly ‘walkers.’” That meant six pilots who were extravehicular from having ejected before the destruction of their starfighters. But what were the odds that, randomly, the rescue pilot had run across only friendly pilots? Most rescue beacons were on common comm channels and unscrambled, with interplanetary rules of war dictating that forces of any side perform rescues. Had the shuttle pilot just ignored signals from enemy walkers? Had he fired upon enemy ejectees?
Oldathan didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d been hearing more and more of these communi
cations in recent weeks. He knew that rumors of harsh treatment of enemy prisoners of war were increasing—both in GA camps and in Commenori camps. He knew that overtaxed Commenori personnel were, increasingly, channeling their anger and frustration into private activities: entertainments made specifically to cater to their changing tastes, such as underground bloodsports, or so rumor had it. This bothered Oldathan a lot. It was something his fellow pilots—sophisticated, educated men and women compared with many serving in the armed forces—had not done even at the height of the frustrations and terrors of the Yuuzhan Vong War.
The military leaders officially didn’t see any of this. Unofficially, they approved. Fewer pilots were cracking up—that meant more experience was staying in the cockpits. That was all that mattered.
Danen’s voice interrupted his musings. “I just saw a star disappear.”
“Sure you did.” Oldathan checked his sensor board again. He saw nothing but the five starfighters of his squadron. “If the Alliance can make whole stars disappear, we need to surrender now.”
“No, really. In the Jeweled Lizard. Second star from the end of the tail.”
Oldathan craned his neck to look upward, then brought the nose of the K-wing up so it would be easier for him to look. Sure enough, the tail of the familiar constellation had only four stars in it now, not five.
Then the missing star reappeared.
Almost holding his breath, Oldathan sent the K-wing into a spiraling climb toward that distant point in space, widening the pattern as he ascended. A moment later, the last star in the lizard’s tail vanished, then reappeared a few seconds afterward.
And there was still nothing on his sensors.
“Grayfeather One to squadron, Grayfeather One to Starfighter Control. We have an anomaly here, spaceward from my position, distance unknown, size unknown. Suspect it may be a cloaked capital vessel.” Starship cloaking mechanisms were rare due to the tremendous power drains they cost their host vehicles and, depending on the design, the usually fatal price of the vehicle controllers having no ability to detect anything outside their cloaking fields. But they did exist, and had been used within living memory.
“Grayfeather One, acknowledged.”
Oldathan switched to squadron frequency. “Two through Five, maintain your current patterns, but scan visually along the line I’m about to transmit.” He had Danen plot a missile-firing solution toward the anomaly zone and transmit it to the others. It appeared on the sensor boards as a line from his current position to the farthest reaches of the Commenor system, toward the end of the Jeweled Lizard’s tail.
A few moments later Grayfeather Four reported in. “I have it, sir.”
“Give me a plot.”
Seconds passed, and then another red line appeared on the sensor board. Together with Oldathan’s line, it formed two sides of a very long, narrow triangle. The third line, the triangle’s base, had it been drawn, would have been much shorter than the other two, and would have spanned only a fraction of Commenor’s diameter.
“Everybody, keep at it, update sightings on our sensor board. I’m heading up.” Oldathan switched back to fleet frequency, then sent his K-wing on a rapid ascent straight toward the target. “Control, blip is definitely an inbound ship. We’re triangulating to get its speed of approach.”
“Understood, Grayfeather One. We’ll have support your way within minutes.”
Oldathan shook his head. Starfighter Control was not likely to divert vehicles already engaged in Commenor orbit, meaning that what he’d get would be some reserve squadrons—likely as not, some planetary defense TIE fighters so old that their solar array wings wobbled.
As Oldathan climbed away from Commenor, the other Grayfeathers continued to supply him data. More lines appeared on his sensor board. They didn’t form a clean image; the triangle was shortening.
Danen muttered to himself as he ran mathematical calculations. “Best guess, it’s now at about twenty thousand clicks. And moving at about forty thousand clicks per hour.”
Oldathan grunted an acknowledgment. “It should begin decelerating pretty soon.”
Under constant acceleration, Grayfeather One closed the distance to the target in short order. Oldathan decelerated and swung wide of the incoming vessel’s approach path—not being able to see it or precisely calculate its speed made him twitchy, nervous about collision.
But now his target was easy to detect. Sensors still did not pick it up, nor could the naked eye, but there was a growing dark spot in space where stars just blanked out.
A big dark spot in space. “Danen, can you give me an estimated size?”
“Uhhh…Circle it, would you?”
Oldathan did, drawing ever closer as he maneuvered. His own estimates made his mouth go dry. “I hope your numbers are friendlier than my guesses.”
“I don’t think so. I’d hazard…thirty, forty kilometers across. At least.”
“Grayfeather One to Control. Incoming blip is meteor-sized. Repeat, meteor-sized. Nature and identity still not known. Blip is cloaked. Request authority to fire upon it.” There was a chance, a bare chance, that it was a friendly vehicle, planetoid-sized, arriving under the auspices of and with the permission of the planetary government, and refusal of authorization would be a sign that this was the case.
“Grayfeather, you are authorized to fire.”
Oldathan turned toward the void and accelerated. The rapidness with which it grew in his viewport suggested that he was close to it, but he had no good way of determining how close. No way before now.
“Arm two bangers. Report their transceiver codes to squadron and Control sensors. Then fire.”
Danen’s voice, now that he was engaged in acts of war, was cool, professional. “Yes, sir.”
A moment later the K-wing shuddered slightly and two glowing lines streaked away from its outer wing hard-points—emissions from the concussion missiles Danen had launched.
The two lines converged in the distance, and, seconds later, ended in what looked like a single detonation.
Oldathan checked his sensor board. It showed the missile paths as lines and reported a distance to target of 321 kilometers.
He swore, swung the nose of his starfighter out of line with his target, and banked to fall in behind the target’s approach path. Now, as he turned back toward the planet, he saw the void as a featureless blackness obscuring the middle of the planet.
“Something’s happening.” Danen’s voice sounded professionally detached. “Sensor readings—”
On Oldathan’s sensor board, a shape appeared for a moment, a huge shape, then disappeared again. Moments later, it returned…and through the forward canopy he could finally see his target.
It was roughly oval, but very irregular, with a dark, mottled surface. There was activity on its surface, lights igniting. He increased magnification on his visual scanner and could see small craft launching from what looked like a power plant installation on the surface. One vehicle was a shuttle; there were also a dozen or more starfighters and something that looked like a small, highly modified Blockade Runner–style frigate, but with a prow shaped like a balloon instead of a sledgehammer.
Danen no longer sounded matter-of-fact. “Nickel-iron asteroid. Millions of tons.”
“We’ve got to…we’ve got to…” Words failed Oldathan. There was nothing they could do. It would take hours, maybe days, to mount an operation that could divert or destroy such a target. Commenor had no planet-buster weapons, no Death Star main gun, nothing that could cope with this.
As he watched, the fleeing enemy craft cleared well away from the asteroid…and then bright lines appeared on the asteroid’s surface, as though a giant child were scribbling on it with a pen filled with glowing ink.
The asteroid separated into dozens of chunks, each massing hundreds or thousands of tons. They drifted apart, moving in a slow, curiously stately fashion away from the center of the explosion that had shattered the asteroid.
“Got to ev
acuate…” Helpless, Oldathan shook his head. He had to do something. By an act of will, he got his voice under control again. “Danen, transmit constant sensor feed to Control. Control, here’s what’s coming at you.”
He didn’t have enough firepower to affect any shard of that asteroid. But he could, perhaps, prevent the enemy from using the same equipment to employ the same tactic. He reacquired the flight of enemy starfighters on sensor and swung toward them. “Grayfeathers, join me here. Primary target is the vehicle with the balloon-shaped prow, which I’m assuming is the cloaking mechanism. Secondary is the shuttle. All others insignificant.”
He heard affirmatives from his squadmates.
He pushed them from his mind. He wasn’t likely ever to see them again. But maybe he could delay the enemy’s exit from the system long enough for the other Grayfeathers to reach them, to finish the job he was about to start.
He engaged the K-wing’s auxiliary thruster, the one used for short bursts of acceleration, and roared toward the enemy formation. “Hey, Danen.”
“Yeah.”
“Good working with you.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
chapter ten
CORUSCANT UNDERCITY, NEAR SENATE BUILDING
Hours after their arrival at their destination, each Jedi was positioned beneath a different plaza-level access cover—except for Seha, who shared Master Katarn’s.
Valin studied his hands. His palms were bandaged over the scrapes and cuts he’d picked up both in getting to this spot and then from the hours of training Seha had put them through, tracing and retracing routes from their assigned stations to the exit point where Master Katarn and Seha were now situated.
But he didn’t mind. Now he suspected that he could make his way back to the exit point if he were blindfolded, during a quake, with a full orchestra blaring away beside him. The only things likely to thwart a mad scramble to the escape route would be the many crawling, venomous denizens to be found in the undercity, so much more numerous since the Yuuzhan Vong had executed their Vongforming of Coruscant and introduced thousands of new species as part of their effort to reshape the world.
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Fury Page 7
