Grassers were not bred to fight. Just the opposite, in fact: for seven hundred generations, Korunnai had bred their grassers to be docile and easily led, obedient to commands from their human handlers and their akk dog guardians, and to grow large and fat to provide plenty of milk, meat, and hide.
On the other hand, an adult grasser bull could mass over one and one half metric tons. His gripping limbs—the middle and forward pairs—were powerful enough to uproot small trees. One of the grassers’ favorite treats was brassvine thorns, which had a hardness approaching durasteel; bored grassers had been known to worry off chunks of armor from steamcrawlers.
And seven hundred generations was not all that long a span, on an evolutionary scale.
These grasser bulls had been forced into confined quarters for weeks, under incredible stress and in constant danger from each other. Today they had endured a shattering bombardment that was entirely beyond their comprehension; the most closely analogous event for which their evolutionary instincts had prepared them was a volcanic eruption. The instinctive grasser response to eruption was blind panic.
Honking, hooting grassers flooded from the tunnel mouth. The regulars discovered that a blaster rifle was only of marginal use against a 1,500-kilo monster crazed by an overload of stress hormones. They also discovered that limbs powerful enough to uproot small trees were easily capable of pulling a man’s legs off, and that jaws that could dent armor plate could, with a single chomp, make such a bloody mush of a man’s head that one couldn’t tell fragments of his helmet from fragments of his skull.
The regulars had better luck with their rocket-propelled fragmentation grenades. Fired from point-blank range, one of these grenades could penetrate a grasser’s torso, and its detonation inside would make a satisfyingly shredded hash of that particular grasser. And with five GAVs at hand—though their turret guns could not traverse swiftly enough to track the leaping, twisting, sprinting grassers, a steady burst from one of their high-velocity slug repeaters was usually enough to drop a grasser in its tracks—the militia would have survived the grasser stampede with only an acceptable number of losses.
Would have, that is, if the grassers had not been followed by dozens of akk dogs.
Where the grassers had been panicked, acting at random, trying only to survive and escape, the akk dogs pounced like the pack-hunting predators they were: organized, intelligent, and lethal. They bounded among the militia, shredding men with their clashing teeth and breaking them with swipes of their tails. Their keen senses could often tell in an instant if a downed man was incapacitated or only faking; those soldiers who tried to play dead were soon no longer playing.
The slug repeaters of the GAVs were useless against the akks’ armored hide, and their turret guns were of even less use against the agile akks than they’d been against the blundering grassers. The infantry had nothing that could scratch them; they began to scatter, triggering the akks’ herding instincts. The akks overleaped them and slaughtered the leaders, sending the rest retreating in disorder to the killing ground at the tunnel’s mouth.
The militia unit commander, who from his post in the turret of a GAV had seen his dream of victory morph into a nightmarish massacre in less than two minutes, did the only thing he could do.
He called in an airstrike.
The gunships in action at the Lorshan Pass were still engaged in shuttling soldiers from the embarkation point at Oran Mas. When they received the unit commander’s call, at least one third were already headed in the direction of the pass. The Sienar Turbostorm was not by any means a fast ship—it could barely reach point-five past sound speed in a steep dive—but only seconds later the sky over the pass cracked open with two dozen sonic booms. The gunships shed velocity by heeling over and using their repulsorlift engines like retrothrusters. Their troop bays swung open, disgorging twenty arpitroops at a belch, then the gunships righted themselves and swooped upon the battlefield, spraying missiles from their forward batteries.
The missiles ripped into the battlefield indiscriminately, crushing akks but also shredding the soldiers they fought. The akks’ only defense against concussion missiles was evasive action, and they scattered into the trees. Seeing a chance for a daring stroke, the unit commander ordered a charge by his five GAVs: they would drive right up the tunnel ahead with his own in the lead, crushing grassers and knocking aside akk dogs. More heavily armored than the gunships above, he felt they had little to fear—a feeling which he had less than one second to regret as a pair of proton torpedoes streaked from the tunnel’s mouth and blew his GAV to scrap.
At this point, finally, the partisans deployed their one and only piece of mobile artillery: Twelve metric tons of ankkox lumbered from the mouth of the tunnel.
The drover who stood on its armored head was a Korun as tall as a Wookiee, with shoulders like a rancor’s and a pair of ultrachrome teardrops fastened to his forearms.
The Korun gestured, and the twisted pile of smoking scrap that had been the unit commander’s GAV squealed as it flattened beneath the ankkox’s massive feet. He swung one arm, and the ankkox’s tail mace blurred through the air, knocking the turret gun of the next GAV spinning so that its point-blank shot instead detonated against the armor of the one behind.
Two pairs of Korunnai, nearly as large as the one on the ankkox, and similarly armed, crouched on either curving flank of the beast’s dorsal shell; one of each pair wore the bulky, unwieldy shoulder unit of a proton torpedo launcher, while the other tended their supply of disposable loader tubes. They had four apiece, and they seemed to have no interest in conserving them. Torpedo after torpedo streaked from the launchers, first destroying the remaining GAVs, then curving upward to blast gunships from the sky.
A few heroic soldiers of the militia tried to scramble close enough to the ankkox to attack the Akk Guards with small arms, only to be sent spinning through the air, chests crushed with blinding efficiency by blurred blows of the ankkox’s tail mace.
At the crest of the ankkox’s dorsal shell, where once had stood a howdah of polished lammas, a heavy repeating blaster had been bolted directly to the beast’s armor. Its power generator was tended by a young Korun male with vivid blue eyes and a manic grin, and it roared a continuous song of destruction, spraying high-energy particle beam packets across the field of battle.
The gunner on this weapon was a Korun girl with pale skin and startling red hair, whose feel for the weapon was such that she could be seen to fire with her eyes closed, unerringly hammering the cockpits and cannon turrets of even those gunships that screamed past on transsonic strafing runs. Streaking concussion missiles were met tens of meters away with bursts of blasterfire; not one got through.
Nor could the gunships stand off and pound her in a laser-fire duel; not only did her every shot rock their ships, spoiling their target locks, but she was defended by a Korun man and a Chalactan woman who handled Jedi energy blades as though they’d been born with them in hand.
Two gunships that tried to attack went down in flames.
Others peeled away, swinging around to take cover behind shoulders of the mountain. An instant later, three gunships appeared in formation straight up the mountain’s face, diving, but firing repulsors to slow their dive to not much faster than a man might run. Ventral doors retracted to expose their belly-mounted Sunfire flame projectors.
A wave of unstoppable fire swept down.
The Jadthu-class landing craft carried by the Halleck were modified Incom shuttles not unlike the ones that ferry passengers to and from the liners that ply the Gevarno Loop. With reclining chairs replaced by benches, and transparisteel by armor plate, each was capable of carrying up to sixty fully outfitted troopers. Roughly box shaped, they were rear loading, so that they could be packed in a solid block, four ships by five, and socketed against a cruiser’s hull, facing outward.
A simple design, they were easy and inexpensive to build, and were convenient to transport. Heavily armored, they were also capable of absor
bing incredible punishment.
This was a good thing, because they lacked hyperdrives, and they paid for their durability with a maneuverability quotient that had been compared unfavorably to a Hutt on an oil slick.
Their only armament was a pair of dual-laser turrets fore and aft, and an Arkayd Caltrop 5 chaff gun, which could spray a cloud of sensor-distorting durasteel slivers in any direction. Gunners on the landers had discovered in their very first engagement that at the speeds of starfighter combat, the chaff sprayed by the Caltrop 5 was itself a highly effective weapon: like a miniature asteroid field, it would disastrously perforate any craft unwise or unlucky enough to fly through it, especially droid starfighters which sacrificed armor for greater maneuverability, depending on energy shields for defense—which would not, of course, do them any good at all against chaff.
When the Halleck—fully engaged and heavily damaged by the clouds of droid starfighters that whirled around it—blew the docking clamps and streaked for hyperspace, there were nineteen landers, bearing a total of 977 clone troops, including pilots and gunners.
These landers had no fighter cover: the Halleck’s fighter escort had been destroyed in the first minutes of the engagement. Their sole defense beyond their own guns were five Rothana HR LAAT/I gunships. These had been detailed to the mission as antipersonnel cover for the landers, should they be forced to make a pickup in a hostile-fire zone. While these gunships had been retrofitted with sublight drives for orbital use, the LAAT/I had never been intended to dogfight against the electronic reflexes of droid starfighters.
They were, however, manned by clone troopers, whose reflexes were not much slower. Which is why sixteen of the landers and three of the gunships reached the atmosphere.
One full wing of droid starfighters—sixty-four units—followed them in.
Fourteen landers reached the Korunnal Highland. Pursued by fifty-eight starfighters.
None of the gunships survived.
By the time they were within sight of the Lorshan Pass there were twelve landers, of which five were heavily damaged. Forty starfighters trailed them with relentless electronic persistence.
And streaking across the curve of the horizon in front of them came three more wings of starfighters, on course to intercept.
The trio of gunships ignited the mountainside. A wall of flame rolled downslope toward the battlefield at the tunnel mouth.
Militia regulars fled in all directions, slipping on blood and skidding through shreds of trees and grasser flesh. Wounded grassers screamed and thrashed, akk dogs snarled and leaped and bit, and the ankkox opened its huge armored throat to unleash a roar that knocked loose rock down the mountain above. Several of the regulars tried to dive for cover under the ankkox’s shell, only to be smashed to sprays of pulp by the ankkox’s tail mace.
At the crest of the dorsal shell, Chalk growled a continuous stream of curses as she struggled to swing the heavy repeater’s barrel in a direction it had never been designed to point: nearly straight up. From his position tending the EWHB’s fusion generator, Nick looked at Mace and pointed an accusing finger up at the incinerating flood washing down upon them. “Was this part of your plan?”
“Of course.” Mace tucked his lightsaber back into its holster and looked up, measuring the approach of the gunships. “Everyone down!” he shouted. “Take cover under the shell!”
Depa threw herself forward over the ankkox’s crown shell, flipping in the air to land beside the creature’s immense head, one hand on the nostril flap beside its mouth, on the opposite side from Kar Vastor. The Akk Guards abandoned their expended torpedo launchers and slid down the shell’s curve to leap from its rim. Nick said, “This is the part you didn’t want to tell me, huh?”
Mace said, “Help Chalk.”
Chalk was still struggling with the heavy repeater, lying on her back with her legs beneath the tripod; Nick had to pry her hands off it and drag her free. “Can I just say I hate your plans? All of them. How did you figure this was a good idea?”
Mace nodded to Kar, and the ankkox’s tail swung over its back; Mace grabbed it with both hands, just below the huge knot of armor at its end. “Because if I’d tried this during those transsonic strafing runs,” he said calmly, “all that would have been left of me is a red smear on a windscreen.”
At the Force command of Kar Vastor, the ankkox snapped its tail into a wide whirl, yanking Mace into the air and spinning him once around the outer rim of its shell to get the feel for his added weight. Then with a whipcrack that blurred the world, it fired him straight up the side of the mountain as though he’d been shot from a torpedo launcher.
Hurtling into the path of the descending gunships, Mace reached through the Force to seize the support strut that divided the windscreen of the gunship in the middle, and pulled. He twisted in the air, whirling through a whistling arc, and reeled himself in as though he were on a towline. His boots thumped solidly to either side of the strut and stuck there, cemented by the Force, facing forward and looking down between the toes of his boots at the twin dumbstruck gapes of the gunship’s pilot and its navigator.
The navigator just stared, unable to comprehend this inexplicable apparition. The pilot had better reflexes: The gunship lurched as he released the control yoke and clawed at his sidearm, clearly prepared to sell his own life and the lives of his crew for one shot at the Jedi Master through the hole the pilot assumed Mace’s lightsaber was about to slice in the windscreen.
But Mace only shook his head as though mildly disappointed. He waggled an admonitory finger, as though they were schoolboys caught playing a naughty game.
The puzzlement this inflicted upon them was cleared up when they heard a pair of crisp clicks, which were the sounds of the safety levers of their seat-ejectors flipping to “armed.” They had barely enough time to register what was happening—not nearly enough time to react—as the activator plates on both seats pressed themselves, and explosive bolts blew the transparisteel windscreen up and out a millisecond before their helmets would have done it for them.
Mace caught the barest flashing glimpse of the identically outraged looks on their faces as the repulsorlift pods on their ejection chairs shot them spinning out over the jungle. One of them howled something obscene. The other just howled.
Mace kicked off from the rim of the roof and dropped into the empty cockpit. A gesture toward the nav console deactivated the belly-mounted Sunfire flame projector. A similar gesture toward the pilot’s console engaged the soft-touchdown failsafe on the autopilot, then he opened the cockpit door and walked calmly into the troop bay.
The bay was littered with leaves and mud and food wrappers, as well as bits and pieces of miscellaneous equipment forgotten or discarded by departed militia regulars. The access hatches to the port and starboard ball turrets were directly across from each other in front of the turbine mounts, two thirds of the way aft.
Mace passed between them, then turned and folded his arms.
He could hear, faintly through the sealed hatches, the honking of the ejection-alert klaxon, and he didn’t need to touch the Force to mentally see the gunners in either turret frantically unbuckling the safety straps that secured them to the turrets’ fighting chairs. The manual dogs on the hatches clacked sharply, but the desperate gunners found both hatches unaccountably jammed until they started putting their whole weight behind slamming their shoulders into them.
Which is when Mace’s Force-hold went from keeping them shut to yanking them open, so that the two gunners practically flew into the troop bay, collided helmet-to-helmet with a gunshot crack! and collapsed. One of them, tougher than his counterpart, held on to consciousness, struggling dazedly to find his feet until Mace’s foot found him.
To be precise: Until the toe of Mace’s boot found, crisply, the point of the gunner’s chin.
The unconscious man fell on top of the other gunner. Mace took two short lengths of scrap wire from the litter on the floor and bound their hands thumb-to-thumb, then un
hurriedly stepped over them and walked back to the cockpit just as the gunship settled on the broad corpse-littered killing zone about ten meters in front of the ankkox.
Outside, the other two gunships from the flight were heeling around, turrets sparking as their laser cannons tracked toward him. Depa and Kar crouched in front of the head of the ankkox, battering away a flood of blaster fire; Chalk and Nick lay flat in the shadow of one of the ankkox’s massive side-curved legs, returning fire with chattering assault rifles.
Mace hit the release for the troop bay doors, and as they fell open, he poked his head out the hole left by the missing windscreen. When the others saw him, their mouths fell about as far open as the doors.
“What are you waiting for?” Mace’s deadpan was flawless. “Flowers and a box of candy?”
Depa sprang into the open, blade flashing faster than the eye could follow, making herself a standing target to draw fire that she splashed back at their attackers while the others scrambled to their feet. Nick sprinted past her, assault rifle chattering from the hip. Kar dived under the ankkox and rolled up and ran with Chalk cradled like a child in his massive arms. Fire from the surrounding trees tracked away from Depa, clawing for the bounding lor pelek.
Mace frowned. “That’s about enough of that,” he muttered as he reached into the Force to flip a bank of switches and key an initiation sequence that ganged the targeting servomotors for the ball turrets through the nav console, and gave him fire control.
Twin Taim & Bak quad laser cannons roared to life, hammering thunder into the jungle. Trees exploded like bombs, filling the air with a cloud of flying splinters and wood dust that made an impromptu smoke screen to cover Kar and Chalk’s run to the gunship with Depa sprinting hard behind them.
Nick appeared in the cockpit door behind Mace. “We’re in!”
“Good. The gunners?”
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