by James Luceno
Trevik nodded, his heart sickening within him. So that was what it came down to. Quethold was to be sacrificed, its stability and the lives of its people lost, so that the Storm-hairs could continue their thirst for conquest among the stars.
And there was nothing he could do to stop it. The Queen had revealed her own thirsts, and there was nothing a mere Midli could say that would change her mind. Nor was he a Soldier, who might fight the Storm-hairs on her behalf.
No, all Trevik could do was stand with his nectar bowl, and watch and listen.
And hope that, somehow, Grand Admiral Thrawn would be able to win.
Quesoth Soldiers were about as primitive a group of combatants as Lhagva had ever come across. They didn’t wear armor, they didn’t use blasters or even projectile weapons, and their tactics seemed limited to swarming their enemies in an attempt to overwhelm them with sheer numbers.
But their natural chitinous hides were tough enough to shrug off even a blaster bolt or two unless they were hit squarely in a vital organ, and they wielded their short swords and maces with incredible strength. And they definitely had the numbers for their chosen strategy.
It was also quickly clear that they weren’t going to give up the laser cannon emplacement they’d been ordered to defend. Not while any of them was still able to fight.
“Flanking left,” Sanjin called over the scream of the stormtroopers’ blasterfire. “Lhagva, Shrinks—go.”
“Right.” Lhagva squeezed off one final shot through the sleeping room window of the house in which they’d taken refuge, then turned and sprinted out the door, down the hall, and into the gathering room, one of the other stormtroopers right behind him.
They were just in time. The Quesoth surge had overwhelmed the three stormtroopers guarding that approach, and a small knot of Soldiers had made it all the way up to the window. Even as Lhagva skidded to a halt and opened careful fire over his comrades’ shoulders, one of the Soldiers leaned in and slammed his mace hard across Bragger’s arm. The stormtrooper fell with a muffled curse, and the Soldier started to climb in through the gap.
And fell backward out of sight as Shrinks opened fire from Lhagva’s side with the E-Web/M from their A-rack. Between the two of them, they drove back the attackers.
Bragger was back on his feet by the time the two newcomers reached him. “You all right?” Lhagva asked.
“Arm’s probably broken,” Bragger said calmly as he shifted his E-11 to his left hand and rested the muzzle on the windowsill. “I’ll be fine.”
Outside, the loudspeaker was blaring Soldier Speak again. “Lhagva?” Sanjin called.
“Soldiers of the Setting Sun and Soldiers of the defense: attack and capture the armored vehicles,” Lhagva translated. “They must have gotten the lead juggernaut stopped.”
“Sounds like it,” Sanjin said. “I hope they like what they—”
“Hold on,” Lhagva interrupted him as the Soldier Speak continued. “Kill the crews and all the white-armored invaders inside.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” Sanjin said with a grunt. “Break time over, troopers. Get back to work.”
“Flanking right!” someone warned.
Lhagva fired one last shot through the window at the swarm of Soldiers and then turned back toward the doorway. “I’m on it,” he called.
“There they go,” General Tasse reported tightly, pointing at one of the displays. “Coming out of concealment … must be two thousand of them.”
“The defensive line’s on the move, too,” one of the others said. “Another fifteen hundred at least. Looks like a few of Nuso Esva’s personal troops are in there with them.”
Tasse grunted. “Looks like Nuso Esva’s decided we don’t have anything left in the transports we can throw at him, so he’s retasked his defense line,” he said. “Figures the more bodies he throws against the juggernauts, the faster he can batter his way in.”
Parck winced. Nuso Esva was certainly right on that count. Thirty-five hundred Soldiers with maces would make quick work of even a juggernaut’s hatch.
“Admiral, two of the umbrella shields are down,” a lieutenant called from the tech board. “Southwest sector.”
So Lieutenant Sanjin’s stormtrooper contingent had come through.
“Can the TIEs get in through the breach?” Parck asked.
“No, sir,” the lieutenant said. “The adjoining shields are angled downward like the ones at the city’s outer edge. They’re too low to permit any vehicle entry.”
“As expected,” Thrawn said calmly. “Nuso Esva is nothing if not thorough. What’s Lieutenant Sanjin’s status?”
“He reports two down,” Commander Balkin reported. “The rest are holding for now.”
“Order them to continue pressing on the laser cannon emplacement,” Thrawn said. “The longer Nuso Esva thinks we’re following his script, the longer it will take him to react to the genuine breach.”
Parck frowned. “Following his script?”
“Of course,” Thrawn said, frowning as if it was obvious. “Why else did you think I let him arrange the art in the Dwelling of Guests and then make it sound like I needed to see it? I wanted him to think that he’d manipulated our operation and had it under his control.”
Parck felt a smile twitch at his lips. He should have known it was something like that. As Thrawn had said, Nuso Esva understood him. Or thought he did. “When do you plan to leave his script?”
“Right now.” Thrawn pointed at the tac board. “The fourteenth loudspeaker has just been located.” He keyed his comm. “Commander Fel, you may begin your run. Good luck.”
“Acknowledged,” Fel said, baring his teeth in a tight smile. Finally. “Gray Squadron, into your positions. Stent, on me.”
He swung his TIE around, listening with half an ear to the chorus of acknowledgments from his pilots as he eyed the cityscape below. Considering some of the traps Nuso Esva had set in the past, he reflected, this one was almost simple. A single opening in the umbrella shield coverage, apparently there by accident, big enough for a TIE fighter to slip through if it came in at just the right vector. And on the same vector, a heavy twin-barreled laser cannon lurking in concealment, ready to blow apart an unwary pilot.
But as was also typical of Nuso Esva, the laser cannon wasn’t there solely to seal the flytrap. The TIE pilots had had plenty of time to map the shields and weapons emplacements in that zone, and Fel had spotted at least eight other, smaller openings in the barrier nearby that the lasers could fire through. Even if an approaching pilot veered off the flytrap vector in time to survive the gunners’ first shot, they would have several other chances to finish the job as he flew away. Assuming, that is, the gunners were fast enough and good enough.
Time to find out just how fast and good they were.
By the time Fel had brought his TIE onto the flytrap vector, Stent was in position, forming up fifty meters behind Fel off his starboard wing. Stent was a Chiss, one of Thrawn’s people, who had severed ties with his homeworld in order to come out here and serve the Grand Admiral. He was also one of Fel’s best pilots, which was why Fel had chosen him for this job.
And the two of them were going to get only one shot at this. Kicking his TIE to full power, jinking back and forth as much as he could while still maintaining his insertion vector, Fel headed in.
He’d closed to within a hundred meters of the flytrap opening when he spotted the telltale twitch of the laser barrels as they made their final targeting lock. Instantly, he did a final twitch of his own, jinking his fighter hard to starboard. The lasers flashed, the dual bolts sizzling past his canopy.
With a burst of fire and shattered metal, his portside wing burst into flame.
Twisting the yoke hard over, Fel spun away to starboard. His momentum was carrying him straight toward the unyielding patchwork of umbrella shields below; twisting around again, he pulled up sluggishly out of his dive.
And as he did so, he flew directly across one of the laser cann
on’s other firing gaps.
He tensed with anticipation. But Thrawn had been right. The gimmicked wing and its fake fire damage made Fel look fatally wounded, and Nuso Esva’s gunners weren’t going to bother with a fighter that would likely crash within seconds anyway. Certainly not when they had a much more interesting target coming their way.
Because while Fel had been fighting his burning craft, Stent had lined up onto the flytrap vector and was heading in.
Fel continued his turn, losing altitude and fighting to keep his wobble from getting out of control, all the while wending a twisting path toward the flytrap opening. He finally straightened out into a course more or less level over the city and perpendicular to Stent’s own current vector. From Fel’s new angle he could see that Stent was coming in at full power, with the same evasive maneuvering that Fel had been trying when the laser cannon opened up on him. Alternating his attention among Stent, the flytrap opening, and the ground, Fel flipped up the protective cover on the add-on section of his control board and braced himself.
For an instant he thought Stent had left it too late, and that Nuso Esva’s gunners would nail him for sure. But at the very last second the Chiss pulled up, arcing off his approach vector just as the laser cannon fired. The bolts burned across his TIE’s belly as he twisted up and away, clawing for altitude as he passed across one of the cannon’s other firing gaps. The cannon spun around, firing through the gap, again just a shade too late, then swiveled to another angle as Stent continued past the emplacement and across another of its firing gaps.
And for the next three or four seconds, as the gunners furiously tracked Stent’s apparently random-motion retreat, taking shot after shot through firing gap after firing gap, the flytrap opening was completely unprotected.
As usual, Nuso Esva had been clever. The size of the flytrap had been carefully tailored to allow insertion from but one direction.
Yet also as usual, he hadn’t been clever enough … because he’d assumed that the intruder would be a whole TIE fighter, a cockpit/body equipped with the standard pair of large, hexagonal solar wings jutting out on both sides.
Smiling grimly, Fel pressed the button beneath the open safety cover.
And as the explosive bolts blew across the wing connectors, ejecting both wings to tumble to their destruction against the umbrella shields below, he deftly slid the cockpit section of his TIE sideways through the flytrap opening.
Nuso Esva’s gunners must have instantly spotted their fatal error. But it was already too late. Even as they tried to bring the cannon around again, Fel rotated on his repulsorlifts and fired a close-in double burst from his own laser cannons. The bolts shattered the emplacement’s rotational platform, leaving the weapons frozen in place, pointed uselessly at the sky.
Then, flying low over the houses, dipping and dodging where necessary to avoid the umbrella shields’ edges, Fel began blasting the houses where those shield generators were located. The rest of Gray Squadron was right behind him, dropping through the ever-widening hole and joining in the task of systematically peeling open the nice secure lair that Nuso Esva had built for himself.
And as the rest of his squadron continued their destruction of the shield generators, Fel shifted to his own special assigned task. Flying widely across the edge of the city, he began eliminating the Queen’s communication loudspeakers.
All of them, that is, except one. For that one, Grand Admiral Thrawn had something special planned.
“There is trouble,” the Queen said.
For a few seconds Nuso Esva ignored her as he continued to jabber on his private farspeak in his incomprehensible alien language. Trevik braced himself, wondering what the Queen would say or do at this latest insult to her.
But she sat quietly on her litter, waiting with eerie patience for Nuso Esva to finish his other conversation. The alien talk ended, and Nuso Esva jammed the farspeak back into his belt. “There is trouble,” the Queen repeated.
“Nothing that can’t be handled,” Nuso Esva growled, his voice barely within the limits of civility. “As soon as your Soldiers breach the juggernauts—”
“There is trouble,” the Queen said again, much more emphatically. “Enemy aircraft fly free over my city, destroying the homes of Circlings and Midlis. You said that would not happen. You said that could not happen.”
Nuso Esva seemed to gather himself together. “Calm yourself, O Queen,” he said, more politely this time. “The fighters may have breached the outer parts of the city, but there’s another angled rim to the shield array farther in. That edge will keep them out of the palace grounds and away from us.”
“Yet they have entered my city,” the Queen persisted. “You said they would not. You lied.”
“They won’t be there for long,” Nuso Esva said. “Unlike the primitive cannons my Chosen have been forced to work with, the juggernauts’ weaponry is equipped with computerized sensor targeting capabilities. Once we’ve gained control of them—”
One of the Storm-hairs by the monitors called something in the alien language. “The hatches are breached,” Nuso Esva announced. “Now watch as I destroy the enemy fighters.”
Trevik looked at the monitors. One of them showed an image that bounced dizzyingly while the Storm-hair carrying the holocam ran behind a group of Soldiers through the jagged metal edge where a hatch had once been. The Soldiers rushed inside, spreading aside out of the view of the cam.
Suddenly the image went still. Very still. For a pair of seconds it showed a view of a compact metal chamber, empty except for blinking lights, softly glowing displays, and some sort of small, round-topped metal object at the far end. Abruptly, the image spun around, paused, spun around again, paused again—
Nuso Esva spat something vile sounding. “No,” he bit out as he snatched up his farspeak. “No!”
“What is it?” the Queen demanded. “What’s happened?”
Nuso Esva ignored her, snarling more of his alien speech into his farspeak. The image on the monitor began bouncing again as the Storm-hair with the cam raced to the end of the metal chamber and stopped beside the round-topped metal object. There was a close-up view of the lights and monitors—
“What has happened?” the Queen bellowed.
Trevik shrank back in terror. Never in his life had he heard the Queen shout that way. Never had he realized she could shout that way.
Nuso Esva barely even took notice. He continued snarling into his farspeak, his free hand gripping the weapon belted at his side. Around the room, the other Storm-hairs also had their hands on their weapons. Trevik tensed, waiting for the Queen to shout again.
But she remained silent. A moment later, Nuso Esva lowered his farspeak, his yellow eyes glittering with fury. “The juggernauts have no crews,” he bit out. “No crews, and no soldiers. Their drivers are nothing but droids. Mechanical Workers.” He hissed something vicious sounding. “And there are no weapons. All have been removed.”
For a long moment the gathering room was silent. Trevik kept his eyes on Nuso Esva, afraid to look at the Queen. “Then you have failed,” she said at last.
“I haven’t failed,” Nuso Esva, turning his head back to the monitors. “The juggernauts are useless to us? Fine. There are other targets that will serve.” He looked back at the Queen and gave the gesture of command. “Order your Soldiers to the transports waiting on the ground outside the city. They are to capture the vehicles and kill everyone aboard.”
“Do the transports hold the weapons you claim will bring you victory?” the Queen countered. “Or do you simply seek a means of deserting Quethold and escaping back to the stars?”
“Don’t waste precious time with foolish prattle,” Nuso Esva spat. “Give the order.”
“I cannot.” The Queen pointed toward the monitors. “The loudspeakers have been silenced. There is no way for my voice to reach my Soldiers.”
“What?” Once again, Nuso Esva twisted his head around toward the monitors. “So,” he murmured bitterly.
“We see now Thrawn’s true strategy. He draws the majority of the Soldiers to the juggernauts, where they will be useless to me, then destroys the means by which they could be ordered elsewhere.”
He turned back to the Queen. “But as always, his strategy is flawed. If your voice cannot travel to the Soldiers, then you, O Queen, must do the traveling.” He gestured toward the Workers crouched beside the litter. “Order your Workers to their places. We travel at once to the juggernauts.”
Trevik felt his eyes go wide. “You cannot order the Queen into battle,” he objected.
“Silence, traitor,” Nuso Esva said, not even bothering to look at him.
“Perhaps Trevik of the Midli of the Seventh of the Red is not the true traitor here,” the Queen said darkly. “Perhaps it is you who are the traitor, Nuso Esva of the First of the Storm-hairs. You promised us victory. You promised me eternal life. You have broken faith on both.”
“You wish eternal life?” Nuso Esva countered. “Then go to the juggernauts and order your Soldiers to attack the transports.”
The Queen gestured in refusal. “No.”
And then, suddenly, Nuso Esva’s weapon was out of its sheath and pointed directly at the Queen. “Give your Workers the order,” he said, his voice deathly quiet. “Or die.”
The sole remaining loudspeaker was less than two hundred meters from the stalled juggernauts and the thirty-five-hundred Soldiers standing stiffly alongside them. Fel eyed them warily as he settled his TIE into a defensive hover above the support platform, wondering if they would decide they should take some action against the shuttle that was even now lowering a pair of techs onto the platform beside the loudspeaker array.
But they didn’t. They’d been ordered to attack the juggernauts, they’d done that, and they were now waiting for further instructions.