by Star Wars
“So you’re just leaving?” Dayja asked.
“I am,” Thrawn said. “Do you contest that?”
Dayja shrugged. “Colonel Yularen told me to trust you. Hardly seems worth questioning that assessment now. Captain Boulag? Any objections?”
“Grand Admiral Thrawn outranks me by quite a bit,” Boulag said. “As far as I’m concerned, he can come and go as he pleases.”
“Thank you,” Thrawn said, inclining his head to each of them in turn. “As for my testimony, I’m sure Assistant Director Ronan will be most willing to speak to your board of inquiry.”
“I will,” Ronan said. “But not now.” Stepping over to where Savit had thrown his cape, he retrieved it from the deck and fastened it again around his neck. “Director Krennic ordered me aboard the Chimaera to observe your activities, Admiral Thrawn. I don’t intend to bend that order more than I already have.”
“Very well,” Thrawn said, pulling out his comlink. “I shall be happy of your company.”
Ronan suppressed a grimace. For once, Thrawn was wrong.
Because if they were going where Ronan thought, and about to do what Ronan suspected, the grand admiral wouldn’t be happy that Ronan was there.
He wouldn’t be happy at all.
And with the Grysk fighters still doing their dance of attrition as they waited for the Steadfast to make its move, it was time.
“Helm, your vector is straight toward the lead warship,” Ar’alani reminded the helmsman. “The fighters will respond with lasers and missiles, their salvos probably partially designed to drive you off course. Ignore the attacks.”
“Yes, Admiral,” the helmsman said. His voice was steady, but Eli could hear the tension beneath the words. The Steadfast was going to get bloody on this one, and everyone aboard knew it.
“Senior Commander Cinsar, is the special package ready?” Ar’alani called.
“Ready, Admiral,” Cinsar reported. “We couldn’t get in and remove the propellant within your time frame, so instead we’ve drilled holes in the pre-mix chamber. That should drain enough of it quickly enough.”
“We’ll find out in a moment. Stand by.”
Eli looked back, saw Ar’alani visibly brace herself. She was taking a chance on this, and everyone aboard knew that, too.
But there was no hesitation he could detect, from her or anyone else around him. The officers and crew of the Steadfast trusted her implicitly.
Very much like the officers and crew of the Chimaera, he found himself thinking. Once again, he wondered at the history and relationship between Ar’alani and Thrawn.
“Helm: Take us in.”
There was a brief flicker of sensation as the ship’s sudden acceleration momentarily overpowered the compensators. Then the compensators and ship’s gravity reasserted themselves, and the Steadfast was driving toward the distant Grysk ships.
They were five seconds into their charge when the fighters opened fire.
“Laser salvo,” Khresh reported. “Deflectors weakening…deflectors gone. Secondary deflectors forming.”
“Hull damage in sectors three, seven, fifteen, and twenty,” a voice reported over the intercom. “Extruding ablative foam.”
“Missiles launch,” Khresh snapped. “Thirty missiles, running on track.”
“Lasers on missiles,” Ar’alani ordered. “Stand by spheres for anything that gets through. Breachers, stand by to launch.”
“Breachers ready.”
The Steadfast continued forward, its hull metal bubbling or flashing into vapor as the fighters’ lasers slashed into it. The hail of missiles slowly decreased as the Chiss lasers and plasma spheres took a steady toll on their numbers, until the last one flashed harmlessly away.
But at a cost, Eli saw as he did a quick check of the numbers. The enemy still had at least forty missiles left, and the Steadfast was down to twenty-five plasma spheres.
And that didn’t count the fighters and missiles still waiting on the second warship. On any balance sheet in the galaxy, the Steadfast was doomed.
“Fire Breachers,” Ar’alani ordered.
There was a slight jolt as the three Breacher missiles shot out of their tubes: two normal Breachers, and the special one Cinsar’s techs had created. Eli watched the tracks as the missiles accelerated toward the lead warship.
The fighters had obviously expected the move. Six of them immediately shifted their laserfire to the Breachers, trying to shoot them out of the sky before they could reach the warship. The rest angled toward the missiles’ vectors, hoping to get there in time to intercept.
Ar’alani had timed the attack perfectly. With the extra speed the Steadfast’s charge had given them, the first two missiles shot past before the converging fighters could form their cordon. The other fighters continued to fire, and for the first time the Grysk warship’s own lasers opened up in an effort to destroy the Breachers far enough out that their acid packages would be too dissipated by the time they hit its hull to do any serious damage.
The first missile flared and vanished from the tactical display as the warship’s lasers got it. The second missile flickered as the fighters found the range. Three or four direct hits later, it, too, was gone.
But the third Breacher, the one Cinsar had gimmicked…
It had barely built up a third of the velocity a normal Breacher would achieve when its drive sputtered and went silent, leaving the missile running on a relatively slow ballistic vector toward the warship. Slow enough that the group of fighters that had been converging on the missiles’ vector easily made it into position. A burst of laserfire and the Breacher was blasted into a flying glob of acid. The fighters held position, protecting the warship behind them from the attack, trusting their electrostatic barriers to disperse most of the acid before it could cause them any significant damage, and willing to take whatever minor damage it cost them to protect the warship.
The pool of acid slammed into the cluster, splashing out across the entire group. With their defensive duty now accomplished, the fighters separated again and resumed their attack on the Steadfast.
They got off half a dozen laser shots before their weapons and engines suddenly went silent.
“Destroy them,” Ar’alani said quietly.
It was a slaughter. The fighters, unable to fire or even maneuver properly, were sitting targets for the Steadfast’s lasers. A shot or two each to eliminate whatever electrostatic barrier was left, then a single final shot to break, impale, or shatter the helpless fighter, and the gunners were free to turn to the next enemy in line.
The Chiss were midway through the carnage when the Grysk commander finally woke up to what was happening. The warship opened up with furious salvos of laserfire and flight after flight of missiles at the Steadfast in an apparent attempt to distract or otherwise dissuade it from its course of action.
Unfortunately for him, that was exactly what Ar’alani had hoped he would do. The more he drained his offensive weaponry at a less-than-optimal distance, the better.
But there was a cost. A terrible cost. And as the Steadfast continued to drive forward, and the range between the combatants diminished, the cost mounted ever higher. The Grysk lasers dug ever deeper into the Steadfast’s hull, and occasional missiles began to sneak through the defensive lasers and plasma spheres.
The Steadfast fought back with its own spectrum lasers, the beams from the two warships crisscrossing each other in a ferocity that rivaled the blazing fire of a solar storm. The laser blasts from the Chiss side were interspersed with the ship’s remaining plasma spheres and Breachers.
Eli felt his chest tighten with each damage report that came in. Sections of the outer hull were burned off or shattered by missile warheads. The warriors on damage control did their best, but gradually they were forced inward as more and more of the outer sections were breached and the comp
artments behind them became uninhabitable.
The Grysk ship was hardly untouched, though. The handful of Breachers that got past the enemy defenses washed sections of hull with acid, pitting and blackening the metal and leaving it more vulnerable to laserfire. A few of the plasma spheres got through as well, and where one of them struck, a laser cluster or missile launcher would suddenly fall silent.
But the Grysk warship was larger than the Steadfast, with a correspondingly thicker hull and far more weaponry. It was clear to everyone that if the Steadfast kept up its strategy, it would be destroyed long before the Grysk succumbed to the counterattack.
And if by some miracle the Steadfast prevailed, the second warship waited patiently in the near distance, untouched and out of range, ready to take up where the first warship had left off.
Or so the Grysks thought.
“Lieutenant Eli’van’to, are your forces ready?” Ar’alani called.
“They are, Admiral,” Eli confirmed, breathing a sigh of relief. Finally. He’d never been in a Chiss warship that had suffered this badly in combat and had no idea how much more it could handle. Hopefully, Ar’alani hadn’t cut things too close. “Generator is in position, and all data has been transmitted and acknowledged.” He smiled tightly. “And I’ve confirmed that the second warship is the same design and configuration as the first, with the same weapon and defense emplacements.”
“Very good, Lieutenant. Stand ready…now.”
Mentally crossing his fingers, Eli pressed the comm key.
Two seconds passed, the time necessary for the Steadfast’s signal to cross the six hundred thousand kilometers to its destination. Another second passed…another…for a horrible moment Eli wondered if the Grysk attack had damaged the Steadfast’s transmitter—
In the distance, there was a flicker of something directly beneath the second warship: the cloaked gravity-well generator that the Steadfast had carefully and invisibly catapulted in that direction before the battle had even begun. The generator that the Grysks had created to detect incoming ships, snap them out of hyperspace, and then go cloaked again. The fact that it was suddenly no longer cloaked meant it had detected something approaching and was about to rudely interrupt the traveler’s journey.
Only in this case, the target wasn’t some hapless freighter or unaware yacht.
And as Eli watched in relief and satisfaction, twelve small ships popped into view. Ships whose vectors had been carefully calculated to converge onto that second, untouched warship. Ships that had been pulled in at the edge of the precisely defined sphere created by the generator’s gravity well. Ships that were now only a few hundred meters from the warship, well inside the range of the warship’s point defenses.
Thrawn’s twelve TIE Defenders.
The Grysk were taken completely by surprise. The Defenders had barely returned to realspace when they launched their attack, pouring laserfire and missiles into the enemy ship.
Not simply random attacks, either. The Steadfast’s running battle with the lead Grysk warship, the battle that had cost the Chiss ship so much damage, had allowed Eli to pinpoint the enemy’s laser clusters, missile tubes, and electrostatic barrier nodes, data that he’d continued to feed to the Defenders right up to the point of their controlled jump into battle. The result was an attack that was surgical in its precision, systematically crippling the enemy ship.
“Stand by, Lieutenant,” Ar’alani said, leaning forward in her chair as she watched the Defenders’ attack.
“Standing ready, Admiral,” Eli said. He switched to Basic. “Captain Dobbs?”
“Standing ready,” Dobbs’s voice came in confirmation.
“Switch to Beta attack…now,” Ar’alani ordered.
“Beta attack, Captain,” Eli relayed.
At the stricken Grysk ship the Defenders broke off their attack, sweeping outward and fleeing the gravity-well generator’s sphere of influence. With a multiple flicker of pseudomotion they jumped, disappearing once again into hyperspace.
Eli counted off the seconds. The timing on this one was more of a judgment call than anything hard and definitive. But it was Ar’alani’s judgment call, and Eli was more than ready to accept it.
From the hangar nestled at the connection point between the Grysk warship’s twin hulls a group of fighters appeared, driving outward to join the battle. “Tanik?” Ar’alani called.
“Thirty fighters, Admiral,” Tanik reported. “Should be the warship’s entire complement.”
The fighters moved clear of the ship and drew together in a brief cluster as they once again fine-tuned their electrostatic barriers to one another. Eli held his breath…
And as the gravity-well generator once again became visible, the Defenders flashed back to the attack.
Only this time they weren’t arrowing in toward the warship in a full-circuit attack sphere. This time, they were gathered beneath it, forming a hemisphere centered on the hangar bay and the newly emerged Grysk fighters.
Once again, the enemy was caught flatfooted. The Grysk fighters tried their best, half of them spinning outward in an attempt to get clear of the kill zone, the other half opening fire on the Defenders in the hope of scoring quick kills or at least trading fighters one for one.
But their tactics weren’t designed for use against fighters with full shields, close-combat missiles, and heavy laser cannons. None of the fleeing Grysks got past the Imperials’ encirclement before they were destroyed, and none of the fighters still in the zone got off more than a shot or two before they, too, were shattered. Once again, as it had earlier with Ar’alani’s Breacher, the fighters’ close-rank positioning cost the Grysks dearly, first as they impeded one another’s actions, then as the Defenders’ fire sent destructive clouds of fast-moving debris into the ships that were otherwise still intact.
Within a minute, the battle was over.
“Gamma attack,” Ar’alani ordered.
Eli nodded. “Dobbs: Gamma attack.”
“I think we can skip Gamma,” Dobbs replied. “Let’s move to Delta.”
“Defenders want to move to Delta, Admiral,” Eli said, translating back to Cheunh.
“Do they,” Ar’alani said thoughtfully. “Very well, let’s split the difference. Half of them to Gamma, half to Delta.”
“Ah…yes, Admiral,” Eli said hesitantly. The Alpha attack had been against the rear warship; the follow-up, Beta, against the fighters. Gamma was supposed to be a second attack on the warship, with Delta being the Defenders charging from the doomed rear warship to the lead warship, where they would join the Steadfast in its continuing attack.
He could appreciate Dobbs’s assessment that the second Grysk was no longer a threat—after all, he and the other Defender pilots were the ones on the scene, with the clearer picture of the damage they’d caused.
But even if his conclusion was correct, splitting an already small force was a dangerous move, especially when half of them would have to fly between two enemy warships that might still have lasers or missiles that could be brought to bear.
“Send your fighters back to hyperspace,” Ar’alani continued. “Six are to come back around immediately and converge on the rear warship. The others will wait thirty seconds, then follow them in.” She raised her eyebrows. “This time aiming slightly closer to the Steadfast.”
Eli frowned…then suddenly he got it. “Yes, Admiral,” he said. Switching back to Basic, he gave Dobbs the order and a terse explanation of what was about to happen.
On the tactical, the Defenders turned and disappeared again into hyperspace. “Tractor Control: Stand ready,” Ar’alani ordered. “Your window on this will be very brief.”
In the distance, the gravity-well generator reappeared. “Now!” Ar’alani snapped.
“Got it, Admiral,” Khresh confirmed. The six Defenders popped into view, their weapons again bl
azing at the rear warship as the generator again disappeared into its cloaking field.
“Bring it in,” Ar’alani ordered. “Straight toward us and underneath the lead warship.”
With both the generator and the tractor beam invisible, there was no way for Eli to tell whether it was working. He counted down the thirty seconds Ar’alani had specified…
And then the generator became visible again, hugging the underside of the lead Grysk warship as it was pulled steadily back toward the Steadfast. An instant later, right on Ar’alani’s mark, the remaining six Defenders appeared, their laser cannons and missiles once again tearing into their target. The warship fired three or four ineffective blasts at the fighters in response, then sent half a dozen equally useless wild shots at the Steadfast, then fell silent.
“Stand ready, Lieutenant,” Ar’alani said, again leaning forward in her chair. Another judgment call, Eli knew, this one just as crucial as the last. “Stand ready…call them back.”
“Dobbs, pull out,” Eli ordered.
“Acknowledged,” Dobbs said. “Defenders—get scarce.” The Defenders turned and vanished again into hyperspace.
Just as the two Grysk warships exploded.
Eli grimaced. They’d seen the Grysk warship at the observation point pull the same scorched-ground maneuver: self-destructing their ship rather than letting it be taken. He’d hoped this commander might put off that decision too long, and that there might be at least a partially intact ship left for the Chiss to study.
Now, instead, they would have to make do with wreckage.
“Secure tractor beam,” Ar’alani ordered. If she was disappointed by the loss of her potential prizes, she wasn’t letting it show. “Move us off the generator’s vector—we don’t want the Defenders running into us when they return.” She turned to Eli and gestured. “A word, Lieutenant Eli’van’to?”
“Yes, Admiral,” Eli said, unstrapping and walking over to her.
“I want you to arrange accommodations and refreshments for the Defender pilots,” she said. “We don’t know how long until the Chimaera arrives to retrieve them, and I want them made comfortable.”