“Um,” Luke said, “with your permission, Admiral?”
The admiral gave his assent with a roll of his left eye.
“Lieutenant, set the playback for audio only,” Luke ordered. “Artoo, keep the tactical going. Plot the Justice, the shuttle, and the shuttle’s vector.”
“General?” Kalback leaned toward him, chin palps flaring in concern. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m pretty sure there is,” Luke said, nodding. “Lieutenant?”
Tubrimi waved a hand. The darker-than-black purr of Shadowspawn’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once while the tactical holodisplay highlighted the relative positions of the Justice and the warlord’s shuttle.
“How am I to offer surrender, when our eyes have not met? Am I to cast the lives of my men into wind and wave before I have judged the angles of your gaze?” Shadowspawn sounded honestly puzzled, almost plaintive. Luke’s frown deepened to a scowl. The warlord was playing on Kalback’s cultural inclinations: to his people, the truth of a being’s character was expressed through its eyes. “Pray indulge this one humble request from a defeated foe; do not force me to deliver the lives of my men unto some figment of my hopes for mercy.”
The flare of Kalback’s chin palps widened. “General?”
Luke barely heard him. That voice…
He recognized the quality now: it was electronically synthesized, modulated deeper, darker, with subtle harmonics that worked on primitive parts of the human brain, commanding instant attention. Demanding respect. Requiring obedience. Inspiring dread.
That was it: Shadowspawn sounded like Vader.
The only other time he’d come across a voice that dark, that unsettling, that downright chilling had been another synthesized voice, speaking from a holoprojected silhouette filled with stars—
Could it be?
Luke’s jaw clenched. “Blackhole.”
Kalback swiveled one vast eye toward him. “You say that like a curse.”
“It is for me,” Luke said grimly. “We’ve had dealings before. He’s an Emperor’s Hand. I should say, was an Emperor’s Hand. I’ve seen some reports that suggest he might have been director of Imperial Intelligence back around the time of Yavin. I should have pegged him right away—that strange headgear, for one thing—but these raids really aren’t his style.”
“No?”
“He was more, I don’t know, kind of theatrical. He would always appear as a holoprojection of empty space—you know, just an outline filled with distant stars, and—” Luke’s eyes went wide. “—and he never did his dirty work in person!”
He lurched toward the shifting star that was the tactical display’s representation of the shuttle: that shifting star was shifting entirely too fast. “Is this accurate?”
The ensign at the tactical console angled his eyes in a shrug. “Yes, sir. In fact, he’s accelerating.”
“Project his course.”
A cone of blue haze spread forward along the shuttle’s vector. “That’s assuming constant acceleration—no, wait, he’s increasing acceleration. Eight gravities… eleven…” The cone kept spreading until it enveloped the holodisplayed Justice.
“Order marines to the landers, and all hands to environment suits.”
Kalback blinked. “General?”
“You, too, Admiral.” Luke strode across the deck to a suit locker and starting pulling out flight suits. “Come on,” he told a nearby yeoman. “Pass these out. Get going.”
Kalback still looked doubtful. “You’re expecting a direct attack?”
“Or something like it. Get me firing solutions for fifteen to twenty-five gravities throughout that cone,” Luke told the fire-control officer. “Lock targeting with all nearside batteries and prepare for torpedo launch.”
“General?” The lieutenant twisted toward Luke, blinking in astonishment.
“Belay that!” Kalback sputtered. “That’s—that shuttle’s unarmed!”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant.” Luke turned crisply to Kalback. “I should say, that’s an order, Admiral. Excuse me for giving orders to your men on your bridge. Direct your men to follow my command.”
“But—but at least we must warn him!”
“He’ll get the message when his sensors pick up our targeting lock.”
“Are we the Empire? Would you destroy an unarmed craft? That’s murder!”
“Admiral?” The ensign’s voice had gone tight as a full dragline. “Countersensor measures and evasive action from the shuttle. Acceleration still increasing.”
“No simple shuttle comes with CSM,” Luke said. “Admiral, give the order to fire.”
“But without weapons—”
“It is a weapon.” Luke could feel it now. “It’s a flying bomb.”
“But—but Shadowspawn himself—”
“Isn’t in there,” Luke finished for him. “Look at the evasion pattern—that’s an Imperial fighter pilot. A good one, too.”
“Admiral—” The ensign’s voice was barely more than a strained hiss. “Vector change. Intercept course at twenty-five standard gravities. Five seconds.”
“Admiral,” Luke said, calm as a stone. “Now.”
Kalback’s nictitating membranes swept across his huge eyes, and this time they did not retreat. “May my pod and all its ancestors forgive me,” he said. “Fire.”
Turbolaser blasts clawed through space. In the bare eyeblink before they would strike the shuttle and obliterate it, the shuttle vanished in a flare of actinic white.
This flare did not expand in a spherical shock front, like an explosion, but instead shaped itself into a single plane, like a planetary ring or a black hole’s accretion disk. This plane of white flashed outward at lightspeed and whipped through the Justice’s shields without resistance. It also whipped through the Justice’s armor, hull, and internal structure.
And the ship just… fell apart.
Chask Fragan had barely begun to relax after the battle; he had just canceled the B-wing’s HUD and was settling back in his pilot’s couch, allowing a long whistling sigh to escape through the gill slits above his eyes, when Kort Habel fluted an unprintable expletive from the gunner’s couch behind him.
“What now?” Chask half rolled toward his ventral side, twisting so that he could see Kort’s screens… but Kort wasn’t looking at his screens. He was looking at a brilliant white star that had suddenly bloomed entirely too close to the coordinates of the Justice, five light-seconds away. “Hot staggering glurd! What was that?”
“Dunno,” Kort answered through clenched masticators. “Nothing on scan—wait, nothing on comm either! Subspace gives back only fuzz.” He went grim. “They’re jamming us.”
“Who is?”
“The comm fairies, chitin-brain. How should I know?”
“Try realspace EM.”
“Radio? We’re five light-seconds out—”
“Which means that explosion happened what, twelve seconds ago now?”
“Nothing on EM. I mean nothing. Just fuzz. Wait, here it comes.”
In scattered spits and static-fogged gasps, the realspace comm gave up the news: Justice had been hit by an unidentified weapon, and hit hard. Ship damage was so severe that the massive battle cruiser was breaking up in orbit. No estimate of casualties, though its fighter escort reported sighting landing craft and escape pods ejecting from the wreckage; only seconds later, the fighter escort reported engaging a superior enemy force as it swept in to fire on the pods. “They’re pounding the wheezing garp out of us!”
“Who is?”
“At a guess?” Kort flicked a mandible up and out, toward the tumbling storm of asteroids outside the cockpit—a storm of asteroids that now flared with the plasma signature of dozens—no, hundreds—of ion drives firing on full throttle. “Them.”
Chask produced a string of expletives even more foul than Kort’s as he stabbed at the B-wing’s controls, powering up all shields and blasting full power to the engine—and that string of expletives turned out
to be his last words. Some invisible force reached through the fighter’s shields like they weren’t even there, and wrenched his ship in half.
“We’ve lost the feed, sir.” Second Lieutenant Horst Devalo, ComOps officer for the Lancer, frowned at his console. “Justice has gone dark.”
Captain Tirossk leaned over Devalo’s shoulder to peer curiously at the lieutenant’s console. “Their problem or ours?” This was a legitimate question, as the Lancer was a retrofitted freightliner over a century old, and was known affectionately by all who served on her as “Old Cuss’n’Whack,” this being descriptive of the first two repair actions traditionally undertaken to address any of her endless minor malfunctions. “Raise the Paleo and the Unsung; see if they’re having the same problem.”
The Taspan system was so deep in the Inner Rim that space itself was crowded; there was no safe direct route. The last few legs had to follow a jagged path of short jumps, only a few light-years each, before a ship would have to drop out of hyperspace and change vector. The final chokepoint was here, in interstellar space, less than two light-years out. The reserve force could jump into any of several sets of preprogrammed coordinates at various distances from Taspan and Mindor itself as fast as they could make the run up to lightspeed, the better to apply an extra punch where it would do the most good, whether to press an assault or cover a retreat. They had been monitoring the battle, the victory, and the subsequent abortive negotiation by subspace feed.
“It’s our problem,” Lieutenant Devalo said. “I can’t get comm even with the others.”
“This useless scow of an excuse for a frigate—” the captain began, but Devalo cut him off.
“It’s not the ship, sir.” The lieutenant’s voice had gone tight. “Subspace interference—they’re jamming us, sir!”
“Out here? Can you pinpoint the source?”
“Sensor accuracy degrading… fifty percent. Forty. Has to be local, sir: they’re blanketing our whole sensor and comm spectrum.”
“Battle stations. All engines full,” Captain Tirossk ordered, his voice grinding like rusty gears. “Get on realspace to Paleo and Unsung and tell them to prepare for jump.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. We don’t know what’s happening and there’s only one way to find out.”
“Gravity wave!” the NavOps officer sang out. “Multiple point sources—in motion!”
Tirossk had been an officer too long to use an obscenity, but he thought several. “Vectors?”
NavOps read out a string of numbers; the gravitic energy was spread in a hemisphere eclipsing the outbound hyperspace lanes—a hemisphere that continued to expand toward englobement. “Gravity mines,” Tirossk rasped. “They’re trying to pin us here.”
“Imperial starfighters inbound!” the TacOps officer said crisply. “Fourth Squadron reports visual confirmation—TIE defenders—engaging multiple bogies—”
“Reporting how?” Tirossk snapped.
“Realspace EM, sir.”
Now Tirossk did swear. Very quietly—not even another Bothan could have heard him. Realspace communications crept along at lightspeed; that meant inbound bogies could be here as soon as, roughly—
Now.
The forward viewports whited out, and the Lancer bucked like an angry dewback. The convulsion was violent enough to jar the bridge despite the frigate’s anti-acceleration field. Tirossk clutched the back of his command chair and almost dislocated a shoulder keeping himself upright. The forward viewports cleared.
Local space was lousy with TIEs—and bloody well full of intersecting lines of cannon fire and the hurtling stars of proton torpedoes.
“Damage reports!” he snarled. “And get us moving. Burn out the engines if you have to. We need hyperspace now!”
“But—jump where, sir?”
“Those defenders came from somewhere,” Tirossk said. “They’ll have left open a route back.”
“Sir?”
“Mindor,” Tirossk said grimly. “We’re going in.”
Half blind, eyes streaming from the thickening fog of acrid black smoke that filled the Justice’s battle bridge, half retching, half deafened by the impact Klaxon and the screech of the overloading atmosphere processors, Luke reached into the Force. Ten meters away, a plexilite retaining box flipped back and the manual trigger for the battle bridge’s fire-suppression system clicked over to ACTIVATE.
Jets of icy gas surged up from deck grates and curled themselves around the consoles that still spat sparks and gushed smoke. Luke moved toward the comm console, stumbled on something yielding, and dropped to one knee.
He’d tripped over Kalback. Over his body. Half the Mon Cal admiral’s face was crushed; it looked like he had taken a square console corner to the head at some point during the series of impacts that had knocked everyone on the battle bridge off their feet and shaken them around like dice in a cup. Luke lowered his head, laid one gentle hand on the intact side of Kalback’s face, and commended his departed spirit to the Force.
In the instant he touched the Force, it gave him back the profound certainty that if he didn’t get moving, he’d soon be similarly commending the spirits of everyone on the ship. Including himself. In the Force, the truth was solid as the deck on which he knelt. The Justice was doomed.
He made it to the comm console. Lieutenant Tubrimi was still at his post, but he was clutching a bloody shoulder and looked unsteady and shocky. “What—what was that?” was all he could say, again and again.
“Lieutenant, put out an all-hands. Marines to the landers. Everybody else to escape pods. We’re abandoning ship.”
“The—the admiral—he won’t—we can’t—”
“He’s dead, Tubrimi. Pull it together.”
“But—but we don’t even have damage reports yet—”
“Damage reports?” The battle bridge shuddered, and more Klaxons went off. “Feel that?” Luke said. “That was another piece of this ship exploding. Get that all-hands out. Then get yourself to a pod, too. That’s an order.”
“Sir, I—copy that, sir.” Tubrimi turned back to his console with a grimly desperate look. “Thank you, sir.”
Luke had already moved on. Farther down the deck, R2-D2 was down, whirring and whistling, leaking smoke as he rolled from side to side. Luke reached out through the Force and set the little droid upright. “It’s okay, Artoo, I’m here,” he said, crouching beside him. “Let’s have a look.”
R2-D2 whistled plaintively and rolled in a tight circle; one of his locomotor arms was bent and spitting sparks at the joint; the rollerped on that side wasn’t functioning at all, just skidding as Artoo dragged it across the deck. “Okay, I see it. Doesn’t look serious—you can probably fix it yourself, once we’re clear. Come on.”
The little astromech tweetered in a more decisive tone.
“Forget it,” Luke said. “I’m not leaving you. We’ll get out of this together.”
“Um, sir?” Tubrimi said with a shaky laugh. “We might not get out of this at all.”
Luke rose, and cleared smoke from the air around Tubrimi’s console with a gesture. “Show me.”
The blurred, hazy readout that ghosted into existence above the console had no good news for them: the Justice had already broken up. The three major pieces tumbled helplessly through Mindor’s asteroid-filled orbit, each surrounded by swarms of dogfighting X-wings and TIEs. The two larger pieces streamed pinwheel fountains of thruster signatures as marine landers and escape pods streaked away in random directions through the fight. The smaller piece streamed only billows of flash-frozen atmosphere. “That small piece—that’s us, sir. The bridge section has taken multiple torpedo hits to the pod bays. There, uh, aren’t any pods. Not anymore. There aren’t any pod bays. There aren’t any—”
Luke stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder. “How many hands trapped with us?”
Tubrimi swallowed hard. “Can’t say, sir. Could be several hundred. But they won’t be with us for long.” His webbed
fingers fluttered helplessly at the display. “In no more than five minutes this battle bridge will be the only place with any life support at all. The breakup has wiped out atmosphere processors and antibreach systems throughout the ship—I mean, this part of the ship.” He started shaking. “What used to be the ship.”
“Hold it together, Lieutenant. I’ve gotten people out of tighter spots than this.” Luke stepped up on the command dais and raised his voice. “All bridge personnel—every one of you—get back to your stations. Secure the wounded and the dead, then strap yourselves in. Except for you,” he said to the pilot. “Strap in somewhere else. I’m taking your station.”
“You?” The pilot blinked in astonishment. “But sir—Mon Calamari control systems are not designed for human operation—”
“That’s my problem.” Luke slid into the pilot’s couch. “Yours is finding a place to secure yourself. This ride’s about to get bumpy.”
“Sir?”
“We have crew aboard who are running out of air. So we’ll go get them some.” Luke pointed to the wide brick-colored curve of Mindor. “There’s a whole planetful, right next door.”
“Sir!” Tubrimi gasped. “We don’t have engines—we don’t even have repulsorlifts. You’re not actually suggesting we take this—this fragment of a ship into atmosphere with nothing but attitude thrusters—”
“That’s right. I’m not suggesting. I’m ordering. And I’m not just taking us into the atmosphere.”
Luke stretched his hands out into the electrostatic control fields above the pilot console and let himself smile, just a bit; for the first time in weeks, he felt like a Jedi again. “I’m going to land this thing.”
None of the New Republic forces saw the fragment of the Justice dip into the atmosphere; even the kilometers-long stream of flame and smoke trailing off its burning hull attracted no attention at all. The Republic forces were wholly engaged with the more immediate problem of staying alive.
Gravity wells had erupted throughout the system, their mass-shadow thresholds spreading in a 3-D version of the ripples from a handful of pebbles tossed into a still pool. With their subspace comm and sensors jammed, the New Republic ships couldn’t even guess how many gravity mines or projectors might be hidden among the trillions of asteroids; the overlapping layers of the interdiction field not only wiped out any hope of hyperspace travel, they also suddenly—and in many cases catastrophically—altered the already-unstable orbits of every object in the system smaller than a medium-sized moon, turning what had been a dangerously crowded system into a nightmare of intersecting storms of rock.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 6
