The frigate fired back, heavy volley fire straight into the Millennium Falcon. The shield alarms went on almost at once, and then cut off just as quickly as the Jade’s Fire blew the frigate’s main laser turret clean off with a mini-torpedo.
Disarmed and damaged, the frigate seemed to decide she had had enough. She came about and boosted away for all she was worth.
“Let her go,” Han said to Mara. “She’s out of the fight, and that’s all that matters.”
“How long has it been?” Leia asked over the intercom.
“About forty minutes,” Han said. “Watch out, a pair of B-wing Uglies coming in from above.”
“I’m on them,” Leia said, the strain in her voice plain to hear. Fire lanced out of the quad laser turret. An explosion broke up one B-wing, and the other decided that discretion was the better part of valor. If only the Falcon could have the luxury of reaching that conclusion. Sooner or later, one of those attacks was going to get through.
“Mara!” Han called out. “Let’s keep moving through them.” He reached over and cut out the ship-to-ship comm link. “Another twenty minutes,” Han said to Leia and Chewie, “another twenty minutes, and it’ll be over.”
And so it would. One way or the other.
* * *
“Defender reports damage to main armament, but secondary weapons fully functional,” said Kalenda. “Numerous minor hits, no major damage so far.”
But a hundred minor hits could serve to weaken the ship enough for the hundred and first to destroy it. Ossilege shook his head. That was no way to think. Not for an admiral in the midst of running a battle. “What of Sentinel?” he asked.
“Sentinel has partial loss of propulsion. Explosive decompression of unspecified aft section, reported as contained. All weapons functional, reports numerous successful engagements.”
“Very well,” Ossilege said as he studied his tactical display. Intruder had taken a similar amount of damage. It was working he thought. They were paying a high price indeed, but it was working. Ossilege had assigned a lane through the enemy formation to each big ship, and to each pair of smaller craft. The idea was to drive through the enemy ships toward the rear, keeping up a series of running engagements, intended to cause disruption as much as damage. And it was working. The tidy enemy formations were unraveling, and it seemed that half of them had reversed course to head off in pursuit of their tormentors.
“Sir! Captain Semmac reports four frigates closing on Intruder. It appears to be a coordinated attack.”
“Does it indeed? I was wondering how long it would take them to mount one. Very well. Now we will see Captain Semmac’s skills as a defender.”
Ossilege watched his tactical displays. Four identical bulbous-nosed frigates were closing in from four different directions, lasers blazing. The Intruder’s shields held, at least under the initial onslaught. Captain Semmac brought the nose of the Intruder up and accelerated, trying to get out of the crossfire. The Intruder’s main guns began to return fire, concentrating on the closest of the four frigates. The ship’s nose came down hard as Semmac attempted to break free, but the frigates adjusted course to stay with the Intruder, matching her move for move.
Ossilege frowned. Something was wrong. The frigates were pouring laser fire into the Intruder, but it was having no effect. There should have been local burn-throughs, the shields should have been weakened here and there. Ossilege checked the power levels from the frigate’s lasers. Why were they so low? Unless—unless the lasers were just there as a deception, a distraction. And come to think of it, how were the frigates able to absorb so much fire from the Intruder?
He brought up a close-up view of the nearest frigate on his tactical display and felt his blood run cold.
Its windows were painted on. Painted on over what looked like solid durasteel.
He slapped down his comlink. “Captain Semmac! Those frigates are camouflaged robot ramships! Their guns are harmless. They are merely trying to get in close enough to—”
But it was too late. The first of the ramships fired its high-boost engine and accelerated at terrifying speed, directly at the Intruder, a multimegaton battering ram headed straight in at them.
It struck just forward of the bridge.
* * *
“Okay!” Jacen said. “I have him back.”
“Good,” said Technician Antone. “Great. Let’s get back to it.”
Anakin came back into the compartment and looked long and hard at each of them before he took his seat again. “Okay,” he said. “Ready.”
“Good, good,” said Antone, forcing a smile onto his face. “Then let’s start the power initiation sequence.”
“No,” said Anakin.
The sweat was standing straight out on Antone’s forehead. “Anakin, please. Try to understand. This isn’t a game. Lots of people—lots and lots of people—are going to, to die unless we fire this repulsor at exactly the right time in exactly the right direction.”
“I know that,” said Anakin. “But it isn’t aimed just right. It’s too heavy. Too heavy somehow.”
“What do you mean, too heavy?” Antone asked.
“Gravity!” Jacen shouted. “He means gravity! Those instructions you got are for the repulsor on Selonia! The gravity is different there.”
“Right!” said Anakin. “Too heavy.”
Antone thought for a minute, muttering frantically. “Sweet stars in the sky. He’s right! He’s right!” He checked the countdown clock. “And we’ve got ten minutes to recalculate the aim from scratch.” Antone grabbed one of the other techs by the shoulder and shoved him at Anakin. “Run him through the power initiation sequence and the rest of it, and we’ll retarget just before we fire.”
And with that, Technician Antone raced frantically away to find a desk and a datapad.
* * *
The second and the third robot ramships slammed into the Intruder, sending the ruined hulk pinwheeling across the sky. The fourth ram missed, but that did not matter. The ship was dead already.
Ossilege picked himself up off the deck and staggered back over to his chair. Gaeriel had managed to stay in hers. Belindi Kalenda climbed to her feet and looked around in shock. They were the only ones left. Everyone else on the flag deck was dead. Ossilege didn’t even bother looking down to see if anyone had survived on the bridge. Most of it wasn’t there anymore.
“ABANDON SHIP!” the overhead speaker shouted. “ALL HANDS, ABANDON SHIP!”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Gaeriel announced. “I can see they’re bleeding, but I can’t feel them, and I can’t move them.”
Ossilege nodded, not really knowing why. Spinal damage, he thought. She must have been slammed around hard by those impacts. Admiral Hortel Ossilege realized that he was holding his left hand over his stomach. He lifted his hand away for a moment and saw the red, open wound. Astonishing that he wouldn’t feel something like that.
“ABANDON SHIP!” the automatic voice called again.
Ossilege looked from himself to Gaeriel Captison, to Kalenda. “Go!” he shouted at Kalenda. “We can’t make it. You can. Go!” Suddenly he felt very weak.
“But—” Kalenda began.
“But I have a gut wound and the Prime Minister cannot walk. We would not survive the trip to the escape capsule, and if we did we would not survive until pickup. Go. Now. That is an order. You—you have been a good officer, Lieutenant Kalenda. Do not waste yourself now over a pointless gesture. Go.”
Kalenda looked as if she were about to say something more, but then she stopped. She saluted Ossilege, bowed to Gaeriel, and then turned and ran.
“Good,” said Ossilege. “I hope she makes it.”
“We have to blow the ship,” Gaeriel said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Don’t let her be captured.”
Ossilege nodded to her. “Yes,” he said. “You are right. But we must wait. Give the survivors time to escape. Wait until we are in deep among the enemy ships. Take them with us. Wait—wait for
Source A.”
“Source A?” Gaeriel asked, her voice vague and weak.
“Source A,” said Ossilege. “We have to wait for Admiral Ackbar.”
* * *
“One hour, Luke!” Lando shouted. “Let’s get out of here while we’re still in one piece each!”
“Copy that, Lando,” said Luke. “Back the way we came, and fast!”
“What’s going on?” Tendra asked. “Why are we retreating?”
“We’re not retreating,” said Lando as he heeled the Lady Luck around. “We’re following Ossilege’s plan. A plan so simple that even we could follow it. Get in, do as much damage as you can for one hour, and then get out of the way.”
“Get out of the way for what?”
“For Source A, my dear Source T.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lando laughed out loud. “It’s not much of a code name system, but there it is. Source T for Tendra, Source A for Admiral Ackbar. Ossilege started getting coded hyperwave messages from him the minute the jamming field went down. Ackbar had spent every waking moment since we left Coruscant trying to put some sort of task force together. It sounds like he wasn’t able to get that big a fleet together, but twenty-five modern ships with modern weapons—well, that ought to do some good out here. Especially if the opposing force is already pretty banged up and disoriented and out of formation and pointed in the wrong direction.” Lando dodged the Lady Luck around the shot-up wreck of a modified B-wing, and ran at top speed, straight for Centerpoint Station. “I think we’ll head for the north end of Centerpoint, thank you very much. The end that doesn’t fire interstellar death rays.”
“But what about Admiral Ackbar? What’s the rest of the plan?”
“Well, that’s pretty simple too. When Admiral Ackbar does his precision hyperspace jump, he’ll land right on top of them, and they’ll never know what hit them. And our ships don’t want to be sitting in the shooting gallery.”
“When does he show up?”
Lando checked the ship’s navicomputer and the chronometer. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Right here. And right now.”
The piece of empty space in front of them was suddenly ablaze with the flaring light of starships coming in out of hyperspace, ships that were streaks of blazing white, flashing into existence and screaming past the Lady Luck to either side, over her, under her, so close that they could almost hear the nonexistent winds of space rushing past them as the ships roared by. It was an incredible sight, a beautiful sight—and a terrifying one. Lando clenched his teeth and wrapped his hands around the flight stick. He held on for dear life, forcing himself by sheer strength of will not to try to dodge the oncoming ships, for fear of flying smack into one he did not see.
And then they were past, and then they were gone. And then Lando slowed the Lady to a reasonable speed, and breathed.
And then the war was over, for Lando, and for Tendra.
* * *
Gaeriel Captison was starting to feel the pain. Not in her legs, of course, but everywhere else. Admiral Ossilege sat beside her, barely conscious himself, bleeding badly. Gaeriel thought she could smell something burning behind her. Not that such things mattered anymore, of course.
In spite of everything, somehow Ossilege had managed to open up the control panel set into the side of his chair, the ship’s self-destruct. He had flicked up all of the safeties and pushed down all of the buttons. All but the last. He was waiting, still waiting, still watching his tactical displays. They were barely working, but they would not have to work well at all to show him what he needed to see.
“There!” he said. “There! Ships coming in! They’re here.”
“It’s time, then,” said Gaeriel. “You’re a good man, Admiral Ossilege. You did your duty. You held them. You stopped them. Well done.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I was—I was proud to serve with you.”
“And I with you,” she said. “But now it’s time to go.” She thought of her daughter, Malinza, left all alone in the universe. She would be cared for, of that Gaeriel had no fear. Perhaps—perhaps the universe would compensate for all the sorrow of her young life, and bring her nothing but good as she grew older. It was a comforting thought, Gaeriel decided. A good thought to go out on.
“I can’t—I can’t move my arm,” said Ossilege. “I can’t push the button.”
“Here,” said Gaeriel. She looked up and saw at least three Triad ships were near. She smiled and reached over. “Here,” she said again. “Let me.”
* * *
The explosion lit the sky, tore a hole across the Triad fleet. For a few glorious seconds a new light blazed up, a pillar of fire brighter than all the stars in the sky.
“Oh, sweet stars in the sky,” said Tendra. “That was the Intruder. They’re gone. They’re all gone. It’s over.”
Lando looked down at the ship chronometer again, then to Centerpoint Station, and then toward the distant dot of light that was Drall.
“No it isn’t,” he said. “But in one minute and twenty seconds, it will be. Maybe for a lot of people.”
* * *
“Antone!” Jaina shouted. “Now! Now! We have to do it now!”
Technician Antone came rushing back in, his eyes bulging out of his head. “I can’t,” he said, and held up the datapad. “It’s still running. The last part of the problem is still running. It won’t be done for another five minutes at least. Twelve million people. Twelve million people.” Antone sat down on the floor and covered his head with his hands.
“We’re doomed!” Threepio moaned. “If they control the starbuster, our enemies will destroy us all.”
Jacen Solo stood riveted to the spot, his eyes as wide as they could be. Everyone in the chamber was rooted to the spot. Twelve million people. They had one chance to make this work, and it would fail because they couldn’t give the right numbers to a seven-year-old kid.
“Wait a second,” he said to himself. “Who needs numbers?” He turned toward his brother, still seated at the console. “Anakin,” he said. “It felt too heavy, right? Can you fix it? Can you close your eyes and feel it? Make it feel right, make it go right?”
“What are you saying?” Ebrihim asked. “You want him to guess?”
“Not guess,” said Jaina. “Feel. Reach out to it, Anakin. Let go of your conscious feelings. Reach out with the Force.”
Anakin looked at his brother and his sister, and swallowed hard, and then he shut his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
Eyes still closed, he held out his hands for controls that weren’t there, controls that took form under his hands even as he reached for them. Glowing grids of orange and purple and green appeared and flared up and vanished around his head, but Anakin did not see them.
Deep beneath their feet, a deep, determined vibration began to build. They heard the crash of thunder from the repulsor, and the sound of power being gathered, of unimaginable force being channeled and focused and held in ready.
The joysticklike control materialized, slithering up perfectly into Anakin’s grasp. He pushed the control stick slowly forward, and a cube of perfect blazing orange appeared before his still-closed eyes. He made tiny, imperceptible adjustments with the controls, and the orange cube flickered once and grew brighter. He held the stick forward for a long, long moment—
And then he pulled it down, as hard as he could.
The chamber shuddered with power, and a stream of lightning blazed down the corridor and out into the chamber.
* * *
They could not see it in the control chamber, except for Anakin, who saw everything perfectly from behind closed eyes. But those on the surface and those in space could see it. They could see the repulsor thunder and roar with repressed power, power that seethed and pulsed and flickered in its eagerness to be set free. They saw the power in that repulsor that built up and up and up.
And they saw it leap out of the repulsor chamber, tear across space, land square on the south end of Centerpo
int, just as practically every countdown clock in space reached zero, just at the moment Centerpoint was to fire. The South Pole lit up with the energy that was supposed to stream out invisible, unseen, undetected, into hyperspace, was supposed to reach out across space and murder a star.
But the repulsor beam broke up the opening into hyperspace, defocused the beam, detuned it enough that some small part of its energy was converted into visible light. The South Pole of Centerpoint began to glow, began to throb and pulse with its own power. The glow spread, expanding outward, stretching itself out into a magnificent bubble of light, harmless light, that lit the skies of all the Corellian worlds, gleaming, shining, blooming, growing—and then guttering down to nothing.
Lando Calrissian watched it all from the North end of Centerpoint, and started breathing again. He hadn’t even realized he had stopped.
“Now,” he said to Tendra. “Now, it’s over.”
EPILOGUE
Epilogue
I don’t even know why you were so eager to have my fleet come here,” said Admiral Ackbar in his gravelly voice. He turned and regarded Luke Skywalker through his goggly eyes. They were on Drall, as Ackbar had been curious to inspect the repulsor. “There was hardly any work left for my ships to do—thanks to Admiral Ossilege and Gaeriel Captison.”
“Thanks to them, yes, sir,” said Luke. Luke thought of Gaeriel, thought of her daughter, Malinza. Luke had promised Malinza he would take care of her mother. How was that debt to be paid? He thought of Ossilege, of the difficult, impossible man who also had a knack for doing the difficult, the impossible. “I will mourn them both for a long time to come. But we have won. Thanks to them, and many others. And in large part thanks to those three children, over there.”
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy III: Showdown at Centerpoint Page 29