The hangar crews retreated as fighters began to stream out of the cruiser. The launches were clean and well timed, despite their pilots’ eagerness to engage. Ax slipped into their formation with ease, a sleek black predator surrounded by willing but lesser packmates. She listened to the comms as she monitored the fleet’s disposition, but didn’t respond.
Wave after wave of angular black ISF interceptors streamed away from the Paramount and its ancillary vessels. They were easily a match for the XA-8 and PT-7 starfighters the Republic had launched. Ship-mounted cannons selected targets and prepared to fire on the Republic craft. The range was slightly long, but the still-stately pace of the capital ships ensured a solid base to fire from. A lucky shot or two wasn’t impossible.
Ahead, the vast field of wreckage left by the destruction of the main Republic cruiser was spreading at speed. Only as she neared it did Ax realize what had troubled her about the Republic ships’ behavior.
The surviving ships were firing into the cloud, not at their own renegade vessels.
She peeled away from the wing she had been shadowing and headed directly for the cloud.
“Your primary targets are the damaged vessels” came the orders from the Paramount. “Enemy fighters secondary. We will engage the rest. Fire at will.”
The sky lit up as a smaller Republic ship exploded.
Against that cruel light were silhouetted thousands of floating objects, suspended in space. Some were spinning circles; others were edge-on lines. All were instantly recognizable as hexes, the droids Ax had fought on Hutta, their regular hexagonal bodies identical and faceless apart from the utter blackness of their sensory pods. As she flew among them now, they reached for her with spider-like legs, firing bolts of plasma from their hand weapons to propel them forward.
In that instant, she understood.
“Paramount, recall the fighters immediately. Get them away from that debris field. It’s full of hexes!”
She fired as she flew, destroying one hex with every pulse from her fighter’s ion cannon. For every one she killed, however, three more appeared in her scopes.
“They’re only droids” came back the reply from the Paramount. “What harm can they do against starfighters?”
“Put me through to Darth Chratis,” she snapped. Someone’s head would roll for this. “Master, the Republic ships have been infected with hexes. That’s why they’re self-destructing and turning on one another. I don’t know how the infection occurred, but the debris field is full of hexes. Our targeting priority should be them first, then the fleeing ships.”
“You want us to abandon a golden opportunity to rout the Republic in order to play target practice against a handful of machines?” Darth Chratis’s reply was full of contempt. “Colonel Kalisch’s orders stand.”
Ax heard one of the bridge crew call out in the background: “Launches!” She looked at her telemetry and saw what the Paramount had detected.
Four missiles were rising from the surface of Sebaddon. Full of hexes, she bet, not conventional explosives. Plus, all of the infected Republic ships still capable of controlled flight were abandoning their chase of the others and coming around to ram the Imperials.
The colonel’s imperious broadcast to the citizens of Sebaddon hadn’t been ignored at all.
“Move the fleet,” she told her Master. “You’ll be caught between them if you continue on that course.”
The Paramount neither responded nor changed course. A wave of anti-missile fire was streaking out to intercept the ascending threats. She could only hope it would be enough.
Around her, hexes swarmed and clutched at the Imperial fighters. Some had linked arms to form wide nets and webs across the sky. Any ship that strayed too close was bound up and crushed. Other hex groups formed whips capable of slinging individual hexes to incredible speeds. Ax herself missed two such wriggling projectiles by only small margins. Other pilots weren’t so lucky.
“Target the larger concentrations,” she advised those fighting around her. “Ignore the infected ships. If they blow, we’ll only have more hexes on our hands.”
She received no official acknowledgment of the orders, but they were obeyed. Squadrons disrupted by the unusual and hostile nature of the debris field re-formed to strafe the densest concentrations of hexes they could find. Ax joined them, taking grim satisfaction every time her cannon blew such an agglomeration to pieces.
Part of her mind paid attention to the wider battlefield. The missiles had performed a startling maneuver in mid-burn by breaking up into four smaller pieces, each capable of independent flight. Now numbering sixteen, they slipped through the first wave of defensive fire. Six mini missiles were taken out in the next wave, and five more in the third. That left five to hit the fleet unharmed.
Ax winced as they struck. There were no explosions, as she had predicted. The Paramount was untouched, fortunately, but four of the larger support vessels were likely to turn, if the hexes gained control. There might be only a couple of dozen in each mini missile, but that could be enough, particularly if they infiltrated the ships’ control systems.
In retaliation, the Paramount launched a series of ground strikes against the origin of the missiles. Ax had expected this, too. Instead of saving the munitions for fending off the hexes they already had, they were potentially being wasted on the people who had sent them. Punishment could wait, in her opinion. Better to be alive and angry than dead.
She turned her attention back to the fighters. The debris field was much clearer than it had been, with only a random scattering of individual hexes left. The infected Republic ships had come around and were accelerating headlong for the Imperial fleet, doing what she had feared they would do once the second fleet was identified. To the people on Sebaddon, to Lema Xandret, the Empire was enemy number one; everyone else had to wait their turn.
“Target the drives,” she ordered the fighters. “Only the drives. We don’t want to break them up, whatever you do. We have to avoid creating another debris field for the fleet to wander into.”
“How do we destroy them, then?” asked one of the pilots.
“We let gravity do it for us,” she said. “Once they can’t maneuver, either the planet or the hole will drag them in.”
“They’re not the orders I’m receiving from Colonel Kalisch,” protested a squad leader.
“I know that.” The Paramount was still worried that the approaching ships were intending merely to ram them. “I’m the only authority you need to worry about, out here. The first pilot who punctures the hull on one of these ships will get a torpedo up their afterburner. Understood?”
“Understood. All right, you have your orders, people. Let’s get to it.”
The fighters peeled off to pursue their new objectives.
Meanwhile, the first infected Imperial ship was beginning to behave erratically.
“Master, I urge you again to move the Paramount to a safe distance.” Where reason had already failed, she attempted flattery. “Were the unthinkable to occur, we would be left without your leadership.”
“Perhaps that would be prudent,” Darth Chratis agreed.
Ax barely heard him. In the background, filling the bridge of the Paramount, a familiar voice was shrieking.
She switched channels to the one Colonel Kalisch had used to broadcast his message to the ground.
“We do not recognize your authority!”
For an instant, Ax thought that her mother was broadcasting to the Imperial ships. Then she realized—with something that might have been a twinge of disappointment—that the voice had the slightly wooden quality of a droid. Why a droid and not Xandret herself?
While the fighters attacked the infected ships and the Paramount slowly ascended out of danger, Ax considered the pros and cons of broadcasting a message herself. It might give her mother cause to hesitate before launching more hexes at the Imperial fleet. But what could she possibly say to this woman she hardly remembered, if she was alive at all? I�
�m a Sith now. I have no family. That certainly wasn’t going to help.
The retaliatory strikes launched by the Paramount detonated on the surface of the world far below. What had already been a bright hot spot suddenly became a whole lot brighter, and Ax wondered if the question of her mother’s survival was now completely moot.
Two more missiles launched from a different hot spot entirely.
Then the first of the infected Imperial ships exploded, spreading hexes all through the fleet. With the survival of her own kind now at stake, she forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered.
THE AURIGA FIRE’S tri-laser cannon emplacements were to port and starboard, just forward of its hyperdrives. They angled out slightly so they could cover every inch of the ship and were accessed by two tight tunnels that smelled of grease.
Larin had taken the port turret and eased herself into the cracked leather seat with easy familiarity. The prosthetic glove on her left hand was just sufficient to wrap around the cannon’s hand grip, while her right hand handled the delicate movements required to target and fire. The cannon itself operated smoothly, swinging freely on its gimbals as though fresh out of the factory.
It wasn’t the first time she had noticed the mismatch between the Auriga Fire’s appearance and its capabilities. Another concerned its compact tractor beam facility, recessed behind a hatch in the ship’s broad belly. It was a wildly nonstandard feature for a ship of this size. She was curious to know how often it came in handy in the pursuit of Jet’s normal job, but didn’t really think Jet would admit to anything. For the moment, the flash and pound of the cannons was all that concerned her.
A quick depression of the trigger and a web of wriggling hexes vanished in a ball of gases.
“This is as easy as shooting stump-lizards on Kiffex,” she called to Shigar over her head-mounted comlink.
“Watch that trio coming in from above” was all he said.
Larin swung the tri-laser and blasted them into atoms.
“Don’t worry about the Grand Master,” she told him. “We’ll find her.”
He had been subdued ever since the Corellia had detonated, shooting hexes with lethal speed and accuracy. Two-thirds of the cruiser’s escape pods were now accounted for, but Master Satele wasn’t in any of them. Shigar had tried broadcasting over all channels, but the electromagnetic spectrum was a mess. What wasn’t jammed by the black hole, Imperials, or panicked chatter was full of the hexes screeching. It was all the new Republic commander could do to coordinate the larger ships into safely picking up the escape pods without picking up hexes by accident as well.
“Dead ahead,” said Jet from the cockpit. An escape pod had collided with two hexes that were in the process of cutting through the pod’s thin hull. The Auriga Fire swooped in to help.
“One each, Hetchkee,” Larin said as the tractor beam wrenched invisibly at the hexagonal droids. “Favoritism is strongly frowned upon back here.”
She wondered if the former security guard knew she was joking. One hex tumbled away to port, for Shigar to shoot, while the other, after a protracted struggle, wriggled into Larin’s sights. Then it was up to Ula to give the pod’s panicked occupants coordinates for the rendezvous point.
“Stay in the channel we’ve cleared,” he told them. “Don’t take any shortcuts.”
“It was horrible,” babbled a young midshipman on the other end of the line. “There were suddenly so many of them, and they moved so fast—”
“You’re safe now. Just stay in the channel and do what Captain Pipalidi says.”
“Yes, yes—and thank you. Another few seconds, we’d have been holed for sure.”
The pod fired up its retro-rockets and headed off in the right direction. Larin hoped its occupants would be okay now. Several had been rescued and then fallen afoul of the hexes again, through either bad luck or poor judgment. One had stopped to rescue another pod in distress, only to be overwhelmed by hexes hiding inside. The Auriga Fire had been too far away to help, but the screams had carried.
Captain Pipalidi, the Anx in charge of the Commenor and by default what remained of the fleet, had a difficult job ahead of her, distributing the traumatized survivors through the remaining eight ships at her disposal. Larin didn’t envy her that job at all, with long-range comms scrambled and nothing larger than a light assault cruiser to fill the place of the Corellia. But at least the lesson had been learned: the hexes might not look like much individually, but they were tough, and in large numbers were to be taken very seriously indeed.
“There’s another pod at the other side of the web ahead,” said Jet. “Do you think you can get us through?”
Larin peered through the scope. The web was one of the densest they’d seen so far, with hundreds of the hexes linked in a multilimbed structure vaguely reminiscent of one individual hex, spinning slowly against the backdrop of the planet below. The limbs whipped and snapped, flinging hexes at far-off targets and scooping up replacements from the debris cloud around it. The pod Jet had spotted was drifting behind the main body, its retros damaged. The interior light flashed rapidly on and off, spelling out a call for help in Mon Calamari blink code.
“Easily,” said Larin, knowing nothing would make Shigar happier than killing more hexes. Except, of course, finding the Grand Master.
“See those concentrations near the center?” Shigar said. “That’s the best place to hit. Take them out and the structure will tear itself apart.”
“Affirmative.” Larin flexed real and prosthetic hands around the cannon grips, ready for action.
“Launches,” said Ula as the ship roared forward.
Larin glanced at telemetry just long enough to take a quick snapshot of the wider battlefield. It was dominated by several overlapping debris fields in low orbit over Sebaddon, the largest centered on where the Corellia had broken apart. The “safe” segment of the Republic fleet and several dozen escape pods were now well clear of danger, regrouping near the planet’s rocky moon. The Imperial fleet was in the process of splitting in two, as uninfected ships copied the Republic’s tactic of retreat. Two squadrons of Imperial fighters were disabling the engines of several vessels, so they couldn’t spread their infection by ramming or detonating nearby. Larin approved of the tactic. She might have suggested it herself had not the infected Republic ships seemed so intent on targeting the Empire.
Republic fighters swarmed around the uninfected section of the fleet, keeping the hexes at bay. Defying gravity and distance, some actually managed to reach that far. If just one was carrying a nest, the infection could take root all over again.
Her mind latched on to that thought—and for an instant she was back on Hutta, staring at the droid factory, and the Sith blade was flashing like a crimson lightning bolt past her eyes all over again. Her fingers fell with the comlink to the metal floor and a scream of pain boiled in her throat.
She blinked and was back in the present. The scream remained.
Launches, Ula had said. She focused on that instead.
Five missiles were rising through the atmosphere of Sebaddon, launched separately in groups of two and three. The first pairing was aimed at the Imperial forces. The others—she was relieved to see—were aimed nowhere near the Auriga Fire or the rest of the Republic fleet. They appeared in fact to be aimed nowhere at all.
The possible motives of Lema Xandret and her followers fell from Larin’s mind as the Auriga Fire came within range of the giant hex agglomeration. She did as Shigar had suggested, putting bolt after bolt into the nearest internal cluster. That had a satisfactory effect, at first. The hexes’ combined mirror-shield defense was soon overwhelmed, and the cluster began to look decidedly threadbare, like a crater-riddled moon on the verge of collapse. But then, once again, the hexes demonstrated their ability to adapt in the face of a threat.
The cluster rearranged itself into a stubby tube, with one flat end pointing at the Auriga Fire. Larin fired at the tube as a matter of course, and the mirror shield
s flashed into life, catching the laser bolt and channeling it along the tube’s center. The bolt ricocheted backward and forward, joining others she fired after it, until the whole tube began to glow. She took her remaining thumb off the trigger just as the tube released all the energy it contained in a single, powerful pulse, aimed back at the Auriga Fire.
Even through the ship’s unusually powerful shields, the impact was deafening. Larin fell back into her seat with one arm covering her eyes. A split instant later a second bolt struck the ship, this one created by Shigar’s attempts to destroy the target. The Auriga Fire went into a wild tumble, then righted itself with a jerk.
“—fire! Cease fire!” Jet was yelling.
“All right, we get it.” Larin adjusted her earpiece. “What are we supposed to do now? Pull faces at it until it goes away?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but we can’t take another hit like that. Our shields are down to forty percent.”
“Angle the shields forward,” said Shigar. “Set a course for the closest of those tube things. When I tell you to, put the sublights on full.”
“That’s madness!” said Ula.
“No, I see where he’s headed.” Jet brought the ship around to face the tube Larin had fired into. Bright discharges still sparked from hex to hex, running in waves up and down the length of the tube. “It wants energy? Energy I’ll happily give it.”
The Auriga Fire leapt forward as though to ram. The hexes fired ineffectually at the forward screens, and the agglomeration’s arms curled in to embrace their attacker. Larin’s hands lay restlessly on the cannon controls as the tube grew rapidly larger ahead of her. This, she told herself, was one situation where firing would definitely make things worse.
The Old Republic Series Page 25