The meeting with Mon Mothma, Garm Bel Iblis, and Bail Organa was still fresh in her mind. “I think they’ll be very interested, Kota.”
“Good. Here it comes.”
A second later the intel arrived on the bridge. She picked up a datapad and scrolled through the files, seeing floor plans, security systems, troop deployments—everything the fleet needed to ensure a victory over what appeared at first to be some kind of Imperial medical base. No, she realized: a cloning operation. It was way past the Outer Rim, too far for reinforcements to come in time, but obviously important, or else it wouldn’t be hidden so far off the usual hyperroutes. One of many such super-secret facilities supplying stormtroopers for the Emperor’s ever-expanding army, she assumed.
“Looks good,” she said, hiding a rising excitement. There was only one problem: Without knowing the provenance of the data, she couldn’t be entirely sure it wasn’t misinformation, even a trap. “Where did you get this intel, Kota?”
There was a pause. She thought she heard movement on the other end of the open line.
“It’s best you see for yourself,” he finally said. “We’ll be aboard in a few minutes. Meet us then.”
“Will you also tell me how you killed Baron Tarko and got off Cato Neimoidia?”
There was another pause, shorter than the last.
“You did the right thing, Juno. I would’ve done the same.”
The line disconnected with a click.
She looked down at the comlink in her hand, feeling simultaneously drained and buoyed. Kota’s return, with or without the data, was a momentous turnaround for the Alliance. The mission to Cato Neimoidia really could be considered a success now. They had lost nothing and succeeded on every front. Mon Mothma would find it much harder to argue against such missions in the future.
If Kota was the boot, it was suspiciously wrapped in velvet.
Nitram was staring at her with an expression that mirrored her own feelings—and she understood, suddenly, that he was the one who had informed the Alliance leadership of her activities with Kota. He, her loyal second in command, was also a loyal Alliance soldier, wanting to do the right thing for the cause. It was only natural that he would experience the same internal conflict she had over helping Kota in his unsanctioned activities: he wasn’t an automaton, after all.
Instead of feeling betrayed, Juno felt nothing but sympathy. How long had he agonized over what to do? Why hadn’t he come to talk to her first? What was he feeling now that the right thing he thought he had done turned out to be utterly baseless?
He opened his mouth as though to say something, but an alarm cut him off. He turned and checked the console in front of him.
“I’m having trouble with the forward sensor array, Captain.”
She studied the display screens around her.
“Interference from the nebula?” They had been having the occasional blackout ever since the fleet took up its current station, the result of nothing more sinister than natural forces.
PROXY was examining the problem, too. He looked up with bright yellow eyes. “Perhaps. I’ll try to pin it down.”
She considered numerous factors at once: the arrival of Kota, the promise of a target, this strange glitch in the sensor array …
It added up to something, but she didn’t know what it was.
“Let’s not take any chances,” she said, punching the all-stations button on the console in front of her.
“This is Captain Eclipse,” she said. Her voice echoed back at her from throughout the frigate. “Set defensive protocols throughout all ships. Prime your shields and check your scanners for anything that’s not one of ours.”
Nitram nodded, still checking the screens. “All clear, Captain.”
“Keep looking, Nitram. We can’t be too careful.”
“Of course, sir.”
In a secondary screen, she saw the blip representing the Rogue Shadow coming in to dock. She watched it, wondering what its arrival foretold. Something nagged at her, an instinct that had for the moment no precise focus. The ground was shifting under her, but the landscape hadn’t changed yet. At any moment, she expected her whole world to be overturned.
A light flashed on the display in front of her, signaling a private call from Viedas. He probably wanted to ask about her alert—not that there was anything wrong with reminding the crews of the various ships that they should be on constant guard against discovery and attack. Complacency had killed more soldiers than the craziest battle-lust.
She reached for the comlink to answer the call.
A voice crackling over the comm beat her to it.
“Captain Eclipse—we’re picking up five, no, six small warships, coming in fa—”
There it is, she thought, turning her attention to the screens. The Lexi Dio, an assault bomber, was under attack. Bright explosions pockmarked its hull. The missiles came from two of seven small vessels darting and weaving across the sky. Whoever was piloting them was good: The next four missiles split the Lexi Dio from nose to stern, resulting in the decompression and death of everyone aboard.
Horrified, she gripped the console with both hands. Where had the ships come from? They hadn’t come out of hyperspace or the fleet would have noticed them. The same with the nearby asteroid fields—unless they had cloaking systems as sophisticated as the Rogue Shadow’s, which meant they weren’t standard Imperial manufacture.
Where they came from took second place as all seven vessels turned their attention to the Salvation and began attacking.
“Shields to full,” she called over the intercom. “Open fire, all batteries.”
A coded signal came from Commodore Viedas. Around her, the fleet began to break apart—standard protocol in the event of discovery. A new rendezvous point lay in a code cylinder carried by every ship’s commander. The surviving ships would regroup in that location, and the fleet would count its losses. Juno vowed not to be like the poor Lexi Dio.
A missile got past the shields and exploded in the engineering section, making the deck shift beneath her. Red lights began to flash, signaling vents and structural damage near the hyperdrive. Four of the seven ships were targeting the main spine but found stiff opposition from the frigate’s Y-wing escort. As she watched, one of the remaining three hostiles rammed the Salvation, just aft of the surgery suite. The ship didn’t explode. Lodged nose-first in the hull of the larger vessel, its engines flickered and shut down.
“We’ve been breached,” barked her second in command. “Troopers boarding!”
“Send a security detail to the main reactor. Seal off life support.”
A much more powerful impact sent crew flying. Juno gripped the console for dear life. Diagnostic systems showed red in the forward sensor unit.
“Get those deflector shields up!” she shouted into the intercom. Another hit like that and the frigate would be effectively blind.
She checked internal cameras. They were flickering, full of static. Through thickening smoke she glimpsed her crew fighting both fires and invading troops. The latter flickered and shimmered as though they had cloaking systems of their own. She had never heard of such things. Luckily they were struggling in a complex, ship-bound environment. Only against relatively still backgrounds did they have a clear advantage, and there weren’t many of those on the Salvation at that moment.
The ship couldn’t risk jumping until the hyperdrive was looked at. Their only option now was to fight.
A metal hand took her shoulder. PROXY’s yellow eyes filled her vision. “Security beacons are going crazy. Captain Eclipse, I think we should—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the bridge doors blew inward. She raised a hand to protect her face. Burning shards peppered Juno’s skin, followed by a wave of intense heat. She ducked instinctively, along with everyone else on the bridge. Blaster bolts speared out of the cloud, fired by two stormtroopers wielding high-powered rifles. Juno’s right hand found the blaster at her side. She had never fired it
on the frigate before. When she’d strapped it on an hour ago she’d had no conception that she would be doing so now.
The universe’s boot was firmly in play now.
She came out from behind the main display console and released two bolts twice, fast, then ducked back down again before she drew return fire. The first shot took out one of the troopers. She heard his respirator wheezing as he went down, showering sparks. The second missed by a margin small enough to spook. She braced herself to fire at him a second time, but the arrival of four more troopers put paid to that plan.
She wasn’t the only one defending the ship. Nitram was crouched behind a display like her, peppering the troopers whenever they crossed his line of fire. PROXY had taken the blaster from a fallen navigator and was using it to harass the invaders, his image displaying a flickering form of camouflage of his own. Juno saw her own features come and go, with hints of Mon Mothma and Leia, too. There didn’t seem any rhyme or reason to it, but she didn’t have the time to think it through just then.
The sound of fighting echoed all through the ship, not just in the bridge. Reports came from soldiers in a steady stream, but went unheard. Two more troopers went down near the entrance, taken out by concentrated fire from three sides. Juno rolled to a new position, covered by Nitram. He may have ratted on her to Mon Mothma, but against the Imperials she could trust him implicitly.
Her goal was to stop the troopers reaching the main console, even if it killed her. That was the symbol of her command. They weren’t going to get their hands on it.
Even as she blasted another trooper to oblivion, the smoke swirled oddly between the walls where the bridge doors used to be. The small hairs on her arms stood on end. Ships with cloaking systems, troopers with camouflage—how was she supposed to fight an invisible enemy?
She targeted the swirls, to some effect. One lucky hit killed the camouflage of one of the troopers, and she finished him off with a second shot. But she had no idea how many had arrived with him, how many were left to fight. There could be no others at all, or dozens already in the bridge. Perhaps if she killed the lights, they would all be at a disadvantage …
Even as she thought that, PROXY was hit in the chest. He went over backward, showering sparks, innards screeching. She couldn’t tell where the shot had come from. Nitram was next, shot from behind by someone he couldn’t even see.
The muscles in her jaw were like rock. The unfairness of the fight appalled her. Scrabbling for PROXY’s fallen blaster, she stood up tall and began firing at random with both hands, screaming her rage and frustration.
From the corner of the bridge, where the smoke was thinnest, came the shot that put her out of action. The trooper might have been standing there for minutes, unseen, awaiting each opportunity as it came. She had given him one, and he took it.
The shot hit her in the shoulder, almost knocking her down. Her right arm went limp and the blaster she held in that hand went flying. The pain was unbelievable. She fell to one knee, then ground her teeth even tighter and raised her left hand to fire at the trooper who had shot her. Her aim was good. He flickered back into visibility and crumpled forward.
Her satisfaction was short-lived. A bolt of energy flashed past her, and the pistol exploded from her hand. She stared at the hand, momentarily surprised to see that she still had fingers. Some type of stun weapon, obviously. A trooper stepped toward her through the smoke, holding his weapon at the ready, just in case she had another blaster secreted on her somewhere.
She didn’t. Neither did anyone on the bridge. They were all dead. The pain in her shoulder peaked, making the world seem gray and distant.
The figure came closer. He seemed enormous. He wasn’t a trooper at all, she distantly realized. His armor was green.
“Who—?”
He didn’t let her finish the question. His blaster flared again, as bright as a sun, and the world vanished.
CHAPTER 13
STARKILLER HAD JUST SECURED the Rogue Shadow when the first of the proximity alarms went off. He watched the initial attack unfold from the bridge, with Kota leaning close over his shoulder. What Kota “saw,” exactly, through his heightened senses, Starkiller didn’t know. But he was keeping up: that was the important thing.
“The asteroids,” Starkiller said, hastily scanning the surrounding space. “That’s where they were hiding.”
“They must have been lying dormant ever since the fleet arrived.” Kota’s right hand rested on the grip of his lightsaber. “What brought them out of hiding now?”
There was only one possible answer. “Me,” Starkiller said. “It’s one of Vader’s bounty hunters. He found out where the fleet was due to gather next and, instead of turning it in to the Imperial Navy, waited here until I showed up. Now he’s springing his trap.”
“We should leave,” said Kota. “Give him the slip.”
Starkiller shook his head as, on the screen in front of him, a small assault bomber was ripped apart. “I have to get to Juno before she’s hurt.”
“Even if it means putting yourself at risk?”
“Our bounty hunter friend will find it works the other way around.”
Starkiller checked the disposition of the attacking ships. They were homing in on the Salvation, exactly as expected now that the Rogue Shadow was docked alongside it. One of the larger ships was heaving around to ram. If the move was successful, that would give the hostiles easy access to the frigate.
Around them, the fleet was dispersing, protecting the ships that could be saved before a much larger Imperial presence arrived. Only he and Kota knew that there were no other ships coming.
“Your new squad shouldn’t be far away,” he told Kota. “Call them by comlink when they’re in range. They can keep the fight going outside while we get to Juno. Come on.”
He hurried from the bridge and through the air lock. Even as he went, the frigate shook from a massive impact, presumably the ship ramming into its hull. He braced himself to ride out the impact, estimating that it came from the forward half of the ship. If the boarding maneuver had been successful, that meant there would be hostiles between them and the Salvation’s bridge.
For a split instant he felt a crippling sense of guilt. He and Kota had had the chance to warn Juno that something was going to happen, while they were approaching her ship, but they hadn’t taken it. By not doing so, they might inadvertently have helped the vision he received come true.
The feeling didn’t last. The future was always in motion. If willpower alone couldn’t change it, then brute force would have to do.
The deck steadied underfoot. He lit both his lightsabers, now brilliant, fiery blue, as they had been on Dagobah, and leapt through the docking tube into the Salvation. The lights were flickering relentlessly from on to off, red to black, creating a surreal landscape full of smoke and sparks. Figures moved ahead of them, but it was impossible for the moment to tell who was on what side.
Kota rushed forward, sensing directly through the Force and therefore unimpaired by lack of light or visual distractions.
Starkiller watched his back, happy for him to take the lead. His concentration was taking a hit from more than just the lack of light. Being so close to Juno and yet still separated from her was a constant distraction. Until they were in the same room together—better yet, in each other’s arms—he would remain on edge.
The figures he had seen at the end of the corridor were Alliance soldiers, firing around a corner at a trio of Imperial stormtroopers who had formed a barricade across a major intersection. Wind whistled around them: Clearly shields and self-repair facilities hadn’t quite sealed off the breach formed by the ramming ship. Flecks of ash and soot swirled in short-lived eddies as Kota ran boldly toward the barricade, deflecting every shot that came at him back to the person who fired it. White-armored limbs flailed as the troopers went down. Starkiller waved for the Alliance soldiers to secure the position while he and the general carried on toward the bridge.
The
y passed the surgery suite, where medics were patching up crew members hit during the early strikes. The suite itself had been hit, creating a chaotic, body-strewn battle hospital where a sterile environment should have been. Starkiller didn’t doubt the surgery had been deliberately targeted. The ship had a complement of more than a thousand; the more crew members the attackers could put permanently out of action, the better for the invaders.
Explosions boomed in the major access tubes leading toward the forward compartments. Starkiller and Kota headed straight for them, ignoring the trams that occasionally whizzed overhead. They were too vulnerable to sabotage and ambush. Better to run, Starkiller thought. What he lost in speed he more than gained in the surety of getting where he needed to go. Nothing would stop him getting to the bridge, to Juno.
They reached the impact site of the ramming ship. No one guarded it. Clearly the stormtroopers had another way off the ship, or they expected to take control and fly the frigate itself. Either way, a blackened trail led forward from the site, cutting through walls and blast doors, heading in a perfectly straight line through the ship. Dead Rebels lay everywhere, sprawled or slouched where they had fallen. There were a lot of them. Too many.
“Juno trained this crew?” Starkiller asked Kota.
“Yes.”
“They know how to fight, then—which means they’re not fighting ordinary troopers.”
Starkiller stooped over a fallen sergeant who clung barely to life.
“Who attacked you? Or what?”
“Out of nowhere,” the sergeant breathed. “Invisible.”
“Stormtroopers?”
But the Rebel had said his last. His head lolled back to the deck, and Starkiller closed his dead eyes for him.
“Camouflage systems—something new,” Kota said. “Keep all your senses alert.”
Starkiller nodded, acknowledging another situation in which Kota’s odd substitute for sight gave him a unique advantage.
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