by James Luceno
The five Slash-Es had come out of jump in a precise formation—a regular tetrahedral dipyramid, to be exact—with the planet of Mindor at its geometric center. Once their gravity-well generators activated, they bracketed the planet with a mass-shadow more than seven light-minutes across. But before the generators were triggered, the other seven ships had jumped in. Six of these remaining seven were a motley collection of various styles and makes, from a pair of refitted Acclamator II assault cruisers to a battered old Techno Union Bulwark-class battleship, dating from before the Clone Wars; all they had in common were retrofitted Class 0.6 hyperdrives, multiple-redundancy deflector and particle shields, and the ability to transport a minimum of three full squadrons of starfighters apiece. Adding to the ungainly, cobbled-together appearance of these ships were the vast number of pre–Clone Wars Jadthu landers maglocked to their hulls, which not only added their own very substantial armor as additional protection for the cruisers, but also gave the four non-atmosphere-capable ships the capacity to hot-ground a fairly large chunk of their marine complements in exceedingly short order.
The final ship was the Justice, flagship of the task force: a sleek, graceful Mon Cal cruiser, sister ship to the legendary Liberty. This twelve-hundred-meter work of art was almost literally the Liberty’s sister; constructed simultaneously, she resembled her famous sibling more than almost any two ships ever to come out of the fantastical imaginations of Mon Calamari designers. The Justice had been intended to complement the Liberty’s speed and sheer destructive potential with more powerful shielding, additional docking bays, and vastly expanded troop capacity, because the Mon Calamari designers worked hand-in-glove with their equally imaginative strategists, who knew that while blowing things up was all well and good, wars were actually won by boots on the ground. Lots of them.
Of the eighteen thousand Republic marines deployed with the RRTF, nearly eight thousand were on the Justice alone, and the additional hangar bays that made her look, as Luke Skywalker had remarked when he first saw her, “a little bit pregnant,” could carry ten full starfighter squadrons as well as a repair-and-refit shop deck more capable than most Republic stardocks.
The cruisers had taken up station in the centers of each face of the dipyramid marked off by the Slash-Es, and deployed two each of their starfighter squadrons. The Slash-Es were able to deploy a squadron apiece. With complete hyperspace interdiction and the sheer volume of firepower available to the cruisers and the twenty squadrons of starfighters, the marauders had been swiftly overwhelmed, and not a single Imperial craft had escaped the perimeter.
By the time the Justice had cruised majestically into a geostationary orbit above what clearly seemed to be the marauder base—it being the only installation on the planet defended by massive ground-based turbolaser batteries and eight planetary-defense ion cannons—the marauders’ surviving starfighters had retreated to underground hangars.
It was over.
The lone frown among the jubilant bridge crew of the Justice belonged to Luke Skywalker. “It’s not over.”
Admiral Kalback blinked. “It was a brilliant plan—”
“It was an obvious plan.”
“Yet it went precisely as you devised.”
“That’s the problem.”
“General?”
“When was the last time you heard of a battle that went exactly as planned?”
Kalback’s right eye swiveled independently to join his left, and the stately old officer leaned gently toward him. “When was the last time a battle was planned by a Jedi?”
“I couldn’t say,” Luke murmured. “But I bet it wasn’t this smooth. And since when does a Lord of the Empire worry about the lives of his men?”
The admiral flicked his left eye toward his rear and back again: a shrug. “We’ve cleared local space; his force is confined to the planet, which qualifies this as dirtside operations. That makes it your call, General.”
“Then we make the best of bad choices. Tell him to hold station and present his conditions. We can negotiate from here.”
“Prepare to transmit,” Kalback said.
When Tubrimi signaled his readiness, the admiral rose. “Lord Shadowspawn, I am Admiral Kalback.” The depth and dignity of his voice was more than equal to Shadowspawn’s. “This is not a Rebel cruiser, sir; there is no Rebellion any longer. This ship is the Justice, flagship of the New Republic’s Rapid Response Task Force. On behalf of the Joint Command, we are prepared to consider your offer of surrender. Hold your position, and transmit when ready.”
He signaled to Tubrimi to cut transmission. “Let’s give him time to think that over.”
“I’m the one who’s thinking it over.” Luke paced the deck, frowning at the various sensor readouts on the battle bridge. “I think it’s a trap.”
Kalback’s eyes twitched. “A trap? A trap for what? With what? We’ve crushed them.”
“It’s still a trap.”
“Is this some Jedi insight? Do you feel it in the Force?”
Luke shook his head. “Artoo, bring up a tactical display.”
R2-D2 whistled a cheerful assent and rolled away from Luke’s side, extending his datalink toward the nearest port. Lieutenant Tubrimi swung around and waved his webbed hand. “I have it, sir.”
“Leave it to Artoo,” Luke said. “Mind your station.”
“But—with all due respect, sir, even astromechs of substantially more advanced design than that old Artoo unit find our information technology almost imposs …” The lieutenant’s voice trailed off as the battle bridge’s holoprojector array flared to life, filling the room with a schematized holorepresentation of the Taspan.
Luke let himself smile, just a bit. “That old Artoo unit, Lieutenant, is not exactly an ordinary astromech. I trust him more than most people I know.”
The lieutenant’s nictitating membranes slid halfway across his eyes and flittered there for a second or two as he turned back to his console: the Mon Cal equivalent of a sheepish blush. “Yes, ah … sorry, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
Luke reached out and laid a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “It should happen again, Lieutenant. Being a general doesn’t make me infallible.”
“But, sir—the general is also a Jedi, sir.”
Luke sighed. “Jedi aren’t infallible, either.” He turned once more to Admiral Kalback. “If you were based in this system, how would you have set up your defenses?”
Kalback’s eyes rolled to take in the whole cloud-fogged system at a glance, and nodded slowly. “Without capital ships, I suppose I would have based my starfighters in the asteroids.”
“Me, too,” Luke said. “If I were Shadowspawn, I wouldn’t even have a base. Hollow out a couple dozen of the bigger asteroids, and they become your carriers and base stations. It wouldn’t take much to make them practically invisible. It’s the perfect camouflage.”
“Then we’re lucky you’re not Shadowspawn.”
“Ben Kenobi used to tell me there’s no such thing as luck. Think about it: I’m a brand-new general. A few weeks ago I was just a jumped-up fighter jock. If I could think of it in a couple seconds, how did Shadowspawn miss it when he’s had months?” Luke paced through the holodisplay and waved a hand at the pinpoints that represented the CC-7700/Es. “Look at those asteroid clouds. How many good places are there to station interdiction ships?”
Kalback responded only with a thoughtful blink.
“So if you knew your enemy had to bring capital ships, and you knew pretty much exactly where those capital ships had to go, what would you have done?”
“I’d have filled those points with mines,” Kalback said. “And concentrated my starfighters nearby.”
“But he set up his base—and his forces—on the planet.” Luke nodded at R2-D2. “Artoo, bring it up.”
The tiny shining disk of Mindor swelled to engulf and erase the rest of the system. It was an ugly place.
What had once been a lush and beautiful resort world was no
w mere rockball, battered clean of life by the endless rain of meteorites left over from the Big Crush; the only significant geographic features were the ubiquitous volcanoes that boiled from cracks in the planet’s crust. Even the oceans had shriveled to widely scattered toxic sumps, churning at the very bottoms of what had once been the sea floor, and the atmosphere was so charged with vaporized metal and mineral salts that it formed a significant barrier to all forms of realspace communications; Lord Shadowspawn’s initial transmission requesting the truce, for example, had been voice-only, with significant static interference.
Even the Justice’s powerful sensors could only scan through the murk with difficulty, and at very low resolution. The only way to locate Shadowspawn’s base had been visible-light optical sensors, and even now, the task force’s best scans could not determine with any certainty how many troops, vehicles, and emplacements might be down there, aside from the major planetary-defense installations visible from orbit.
Luke shook his head, frowning. “He’s tied himself down on a planet that has no drinkable water, no food supply, and where the atmosphere’s caustic enough to cause long-term lung damage. With the interference from the atmosphere, he can barely even communicate with his fleet. All that base is really good for is something to shoot at.”
Kalback’s eyes widened even further: a Mon Cal frown. “General, we don’t necessarily have to honor the truce; after all, this Shadowspawn has not conducted his operations like a soldier, but like a pirate.” He swiveled his right eye toward the ground base. “It seems a pity to let such a tempting target go to waste.”
“No. If word gets out that that’s how we treat surrendering Imperials, no one will surrender. This business will get a whole lot bloodier.”
“Then how should we proceed?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said, more grimly than before. “I just don’t know.”
A chime that sounded like the splash of icy water over river stones caught Lieutenant Tubrimi’s attention, and he swung back to his console. “Incoming message from the shuttle, sirs.”
Kalback nodded. “Bring it up.”
“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 th
e 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.