by James Luceno
“We’ve lost the feed, sir.” Second Lieutenant Horst Devalo, ComOps officer for the Lancer, frowned at his console. “Justice has gone dark.”
Captain Tirossk leaned over Devalo’s shoulder to peer curiously at the lieutenant’s console. “Their problem or ours?” This was a legitimate question, as the Lancer was a retrofitted freightliner over a century old, and was known affectionately by all who served on her as “Old Cuss’n’Whack,” this being descriptive of the first two repair actions traditionally undertaken to address any of her endless minor malfunctions. “Raise the Paleo and the Unsung; see if they’re having the same problem.”
The Taspan system was so deep in the Inner Rim that space itself was crowded; there was no safe direct route. The last few legs had to follow a jagged path of short jumps, only a few light-years each, before a ship would have to drop out of hyperspace and change vector. The final chokepoint was here, in interstellar space, less than two light-years out. The reserve force could jump into any of several sets of preprogrammed coordinates at various distances from Taspan and Mindor itself as fast as they could make the run up to lightspeed, the better to apply an extra punch where it would do the most good, whether to press an assault or cover a retreat. They had been monitoring the battle, the victory, and the subsequent abortive negotiation by subspace feed.
“It’s our problem,” Lieutenant Devalo said. “I can’t get comm even with the others.”
“This useless scow of an excuse for a frigate—” the captain began, but Devalo cut him off.
“It’s not the ship, sir.” The lieutenant’s voice had gone tight. “Subspace interference—they’re jamming us, sir!”
“Out here? Can you pinpoint the source?”
“Sensor accuracy degrading … fifty percent. Forty. Has to be local, sir: they’re blanketing our whole sensor and comm spectrum.”
“Battle stations. All engines full,” Captain Tirossk ordered, his voice grinding like rusty gears. “Get on realspace to Paleo and Unsung and tell them to prepare for jump.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. We don’t know what’s happening and there’s only one way to find out.”
“Gravity wave!” the NavOps officer sang out. “Multiple point sources—in motion!”
Tirossk had been an officer too long to use an obscenity, but he thought several. “Vectors?”
NavOps read out a string of numbers; the gravitic energy was spread in a hemisphere eclipsing the outbound hyperspace lanes—a hemisphere that continued to expand toward englobement. “Gravity mines,” Tirossk rasped. “They’re trying to pin us here.”
“Imperial starfighters inbound!” the TacOps officer said crisply. “Fourth Squadron reports visual confirmation—TIE defenders—engaging multiple bogies—”
“Reporting how?” Tirossk snapped.
“Realspace EM, sir.”
Now Tirossk did swear. Very quietly—not even another Bothan could have heard him. Realspace communications crept along at lightspeed; that meant inbound bogies could be here as soon as, roughly—
Now.
The forward viewports whited out, and the Lancer bucked like an angry dewback. The convulsion was violent enough to jar the bridge despite the frigate’s anti-acceleration field. Tirossk clutched the back of his command chair and almost dislocated a shoulder keeping himself upright. The forward viewports cleared.
Local space was lousy with TIEs—and bloody well full of intersecting lines of cannon fire and the hurtling stars of proton torpedoes.
“Damage reports!” he snarled. “And get us moving. Burn out the engines if you have to. We need hyperspace now!”
“But—jump where, sir?”
“Those defenders came from somewhere,” Tirossk said. “They’ll have left open a route back.”
“Sir?”
“Mindor,” Tirossk said grimly. “We’re going in.”
Half blind, eyes streaming from the thickening fog of acrid black smoke that filled the Justice’s battle bridge, half retching, half deafened by the impact Klaxon and the screech of the overloading atmosphere processors, Luke reached into the Force. Ten meters away, a plexilite retaining box flipped back and the manual trigger for the battle bridge’s fire-suppression system clicked over to ACTIVATE.
Jets of icy gas surged up from deck grates and curled themselves around the consoles that still spat sparks and gushed smoke. Luke moved toward the comm console, stumbled on something yielding, and dropped to one knee.
He’d tripped over Kalback. Over his body. Half the Mon Cal admiral’s face was crushed; it looked like he had taken a square console corner to the head at some point during the series of impacts that had knocked everyone on the battle bridge off their feet and shaken them around like dice in a cup. Luke lowered his head, laid one gentle hand on the intact side of Kalback’s face, and commended his departed spirit to the Force.
In the instant he touched the Force, it gave him back the profound certainty that if he didn’t get moving, he’d soon be similarly commending the spirits of everyone on the ship. Including himself. In the Force, the truth was solid as the deck on which he knelt. The Justice was doomed.
He made it to the comm console. Lieutenant Tubrimi was still at his post, but he was clutching a bloody shoulder and looked unsteady and shocky. “What—what was that?” was all he could say, again and again.
“Lieutenant, put out an all-hands. Marines to the landers. Everybody else to escape pods. We’re abandoning ship.”
“The—the admiral—he won’t—we can’t—”
“He’s dead, Tubrimi. Pull it together.”
“But—but we don’t even have damage reports yet—”
“Damage reports?” The battle bridge shuddered, and more Klaxons went off. “Feel that?” Luke said. “That was another piece of this ship exploding. Get that all-hands out. Then get yourself to a pod, too. That’s an order.”
“Sir, I—copy that, sir.” Tubrimi turned back to his console with a grimly desperate look. “Thank you, sir.”
Luke had already moved on. Farther down the deck, R2-D2 was down, whirring and whistling, leaking smoke as he rolled from side to side. Luke reached out through the Force and set the little droid upright. “It’s okay, Artoo, I’m here,” he said, crouching beside him. “Let’s have a look.”
R2-D2 whistled plaintively and rolled in a tight circle; one of his locomotor arms was bent and spitting sparks at the joint; the rollerped on that side wasn’t functioning at all, just skidding as Artoo dragged it across the deck. “Okay, I see it. Doesn’t look serious—you can probably fix it yourself, once we’re clear. Come on.”
The little astromech tweetered in a more decisive tone.
“Forget it,” Luke said. “I’m not leaving you. We’ll get out of this together.”
“Um, sir?” Tubrimi said with a shaky laugh. “We might not get out of this at all.”
Luke rose, and cleared smoke from the air around Tubrimi’s console with a gesture. “Show me.”
The blurred, hazy readout that ghosted into existence above the console had no good news for them: the Justice had already broken up. The three major pieces tumbled helplessly through Mindor’s asteroid-filled orbit, each surrounded by swarms of dogfighting X-wings and TIEs. The two larger pieces streamed pinwheel fountains of thruster signatures as marine landers and escape pods streaked away in random directions through the fight. The smaller piece streamed only billows of flash-frozen atmosphere. “That small piece—that’s us, sir. The bridge section has taken multiple torpedo hits to the pod bays. There, uh, aren’t any pods. Not anymore. There aren’t any pod bays. There aren’t any—”
Luke stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder. “How many hands trapped with us?”
Tubrimi swallowed hard. “Can’t say, sir. Could be several hundred. But they won’t be with us for long.” His webbed fingers fluttered helplessly at the display. “In no more than five minutes this battle bridge will be the only place with any life support at
all. The breakup has wiped out atmosphere processors and antibreach systems throughout the ship—I mean, this part of the ship.” He started shaking. “What used to be the ship.”
“Hold it together, Lieutenant. I’ve gotten people out of tighter spots than this.” Luke stepped up on the command dais and raised his voice. “All bridge personnel—every one of you—get back to your stations. Secure the wounded and the dead, then strap yourselves in. Except for you,” he said to the pilot. “Strap in somewhere else. I’m taking your station.”
“You?” The pilot blinked in astonishment. “But sir—Mon Calamari control systems are not designed for human operation—”
“That’s my problem.” Luke slid into the pilot’s couch. “Yours is finding a place to secure yourself. This ride’s about to get bumpy.”
“Sir?”
“We have crew aboard who are running out of air. So we’ll go get them some.” Luke pointed to the wide brick-colored curve of Mindor. “There’s a whole planetful, right next door.”
“Sir!” Tubrimi gasped. “We don’t have engines—we don’t even have repulsorlifts. You’re not actually suggesting we take this—this fragment of a ship into atmosphere with nothing but attitude thrusters—”
“That’s right. I’m not suggesting. I’m ordering. And I’m not just taking us into the atmosphere.”
Luke stretched his hands out into the electrostatic control fields above the pilot console and let himself smile, just a bit; for the first time in weeks, he felt like a Jedi again. “I’m going to land this thing.”
None of the New Republic forces saw the fragment of the Justice dip into the atmosphere; even the kilometers-long stream of flame and smoke trailing off its burning hull attracted no attention at all. The Republic forces were wholly engaged with the more immediate problem of staying alive.
Gravity wells had erupted throughout the system, their mass-shadow thresholds spreading in a 3-D version of the ripples from a handful of pebbles tossed into a still pool. With their subspace comm and sensors jammed, the New Republic ships couldn’t even guess how many gravity mines or projectors might be hidden among the trillions of asteroids; the overlapping layers of the interdiction field not only wiped out any hope of hyperspace travel, they also suddenly—and in many cases catastrophically—altered the already-unstable orbits of every object in the system smaller than a medium-sized moon, turning what had been a dangerously crowded system into a nightmare of intersecting storms of rock.
And the hail that streamed from these storms was squadron after squadron of TIE interceptors.
The interceptor was not so dominating a weapon as its successor, the defender. With less armor, less weaponry, and no shields or hyperdrive, they were nonetheless incredibly swift and maneuverable, and could be exceedingly difficult opponents, especially when appearing en masse. Here at Mindor—as the desperately scrambling Republic X- and B-wing pilots discovered, to their dismay—en masse translated to (in the words of one flight leader) “thousands of the beggars, comin’ from everywhere all at frappin’ once!”
In the swirling chaos of randomly hurtling asteroids, the interceptors’ lack of shields was actually an advantage, as deflectors don’t affect material objects; the deflectorless interceptors had proportionally more engine power for acceleration and to recharge the capacitors for their laser cannons, and there were so many of them that they could swarm the Republic fighters like Pervian blood crows mobbing a wonderhawk and still have plenty left over to strafe the capital ships, which was why nobody was keeping an eye on the optical sensors or monitoring the Justice’s EM channel, on which was playing a loop of Luke Skywalker’s low, preternaturally calm voice broadcast by an emergency signal buoy orbiting the planet.
“This is New Republic cruiser Justice, Luke Skywalker commanding. Admiral Kalback is dead. The ship has broken up, and there are no escape pods remaining. I have taken the helm and will attempt to set down behind the dawn terminator above the north tropic. Begin the search for survivors at the coordinates on the encoded supplementary frequency. Good luck, and may the Force be with you. Skywalker out.”
Only the Lancer, yanked unexpectedly from hyperspace by the Imperial gravity mines half a light-hour out from Mindor, had the chance to catch the actual landing, such as it was.
Lieutenant Devalo, at ComOps, went ashen as he picked up the broadcast from the signal buoy; when he reported it to Captain Tirossk, the captain’s response was to instantly aim the Lancer’s most powerful optical scope at the day-night terminator of the distant planet. The aged ship’s sensor suite had just barely managed to focus on an image of a long, long smoke trail, and was tracking it down through the atmosphere when it picked up the fringes of a brilliant white flash, followed by a vast expanding ball of smoke-laced flame.
“Oh,” Tirossk said numbly. There was no thought of obscenity now; how he felt could not be expressed in words.
“Was that—” Devalo had to swallow before he could go on. “Was that the Justice?”
“I’m afraid it must have been.” Tirossk sank into his command chair. “I’m afraid …”
“General Skywalker’s ship?”
“No one could have survived that,” Tirossk said. “We’re half a light-hour out. What we just saw, it happened thirty minutes ago.”
Devalo couldn’t even ask the question, but he didn’t have to.
“He died half an hour ago.” Tirossk shook his head, blankly astonished at the bleak weight that settled onto him. “Luke Skywalker is dead.”
CHAPTER 5
Han Solo stretched back far enough in the conference room chair that when he laced his fingers together behind his head, he had to jam one knee up under the table to keep from toppling over. He stared at the ceiling and wondered, for the three or four hundredth time that day, if it was possible to die of boredom.
He decided, as he had all the other times, that if such a thing were possible he would have bumped off at least two days ago. If there was anything in the galaxy he hated more than sitting around in a room for hours on end with nothing to do but listen to people yap, it had to be sitting around in a room for hours with nothing to do except listen to Mandalorians yap.
Man, he hated those guys!
Han was no bigot; despite some unfortunate experiences with a certain Mando bounty hunter—who, if the Force believed in justice, was still to this very day screaming as he slowly dissolved in a sarlacc’s digestive juices—he didn’t hate Mandalorians in general. He’d just never met a single one of these stuck-up more-studly-than-thou self-proclaimed MESFACs (Masters of Every Single Flippin’ Aspect of Combat) who could even so much as say “Good morning” without making it sound like he was really saying It better be a good morning, because if you pull anything, I will without hesitation jariler your weak peace-lovin’ Corellian butt till you don’t even know what galaxy you’re in.
He didn’t hate Mandos in general; he only hated the ones he’d actually met.
Further, some screwed-up sense of honor or ethnic pride or something had somehow made these particular Mandalorians unwilling to speak Basic during these talks. Which didn’t stop them from yapping, of course. They just yapped in Mando’a, a language that, to Han’s more-than-somewhat biased ear, made them sound like a pride of sand panthers trying to cough up hairballs bigger than his head. And this hairball-hacking then had to be dutifully translated into Basic for the convenience of the chief New Republic negotiator by the chief negotiator’s high-strung, hypersensitive, relentlessly neurotic protocol droid, who somehow among his six million flippin’ forms of communication had never managed to lose that snooty Core Worlds accent that, after hearing it nonstop for a couple of days cooped up in this room with nothing better to do, made Han want to whop him so hard he’d land somewhere back on Tatooine.
The main consideration that stopped him from engaging in catastrophic droid-remodeling was the presence beside him of the New Republic’s chief negotiator, who was so breathtakingly beautiful that Han couldn’t eve
n glance her way without feeling his heart begin to pound.
She was not only beautiful but brilliant and fiercely courageous, and she had done only one really foolish thing in her life: a couple of years ago, she had let herself fall in love with a dashing-but-impoverished tramp-freighter captain—well, okay, a disreputable smuggler on the run from Imperial authorities and various bounty hunters and crime lords, but who was counting?—and Han could never shake this lurking dread that if he, say, did something nasty to C-3PO, who, after all, usually meant well, Leia might suddenly wake up and realize what an awful mistake she’d made.
Not that he would ever admit this, not even to Chewbacca. Not even to himself, most days—his ego was nigh-invulnerable to self-doubt—but on those rare occasions when he found himself getting irritable and depressed because he was stuck somewhere with way too much time to think and not nearly enough to do, these little whispers would start hissing around the back of his head. He could quiet them only by privately reaffirming his personal blood oath that he would never—never ever ever—give the woman he loved a reason to regret falling for him.
Which left him sitting in a conference room in a pressure dome on an unnamed asteroid in some Inner Rim system so obscure he couldn’t remember its name, pretending to give a damn while C-3PO translated yet another string of Mandalorian gabble. “The commander repeats that surrender simply is not possible, and reiterates that the only peaceful solution to this unfortunate situation is for all Rebel—that is, New Republic, of course; he doesn’t seem to understand the distinction, or else is being deliberately obtuse, but no matter—is for all Rebel forces to depart the system forthwith. Of course, this is not his exact phraseology; the literal translation—stripped of vulgarity—is roughly along the lines of You Rebels stay, everybody dies, you Rebels leave, everybody’s happy, which wholly fails to capture the entirely savage brutality of his vocabulary. Really, Princess, having to process such coarse language—my vulgarity-filter capacitors are on the brink of overload!”