Krennel clutched at the catwalk railing. “Sensors, are they still withdrawing?”
“Yes, Prince-Admiral. They’re pulling out on an exit vector that will allow them to go to hyperspace in thirty seconds.”
“Security, damage report.”
“Minimal, Prince-Admiral.”
Krennel nodded solemnly. “Helm, come about to a heading of ninety degrees, but keep her level. We’ll give them our port shield to shoot at and a full broadside on the Mon Cal. Weapons, port on the Mon Cal, starboard targets of opportunity.”
“As ordered, Prince-Admiral.”
“Prince-Admiral!” The man at the sensor station waved a hand at him. “I have the southern Daplona shield down. Two of the New Republic ships are heading to ground.”
“Weapons, send a squadron of TIEs down to deal with that problem.”
“Done, Prince-Admiral.”
“Two are running for the ground, and the rest for space. We can’t have that.” Krennel flashed teeth in a cruel smile. “Communications, tell
Binder
to power up the gravity wells. Our dying enemies can’t be allowed to leave. After all, the fun has just started, hasn’t it?”
Recognition bloomed in the old man’s eyes, bringing a smile to Corran’s face. “So you
did
escape
Lusankya
after all. Isard tossed us a skull and said you didn’t make it.”
Corran nodded. “I did, and even had a hand in killing her. At least, I thought we killed her.”
Dodonna stood. “She’s still been in charge of us.”
“That’s a clone. The real thing is still out there, too.”
Dodonna’s eyes widened. “Two of her?”
“Yes, General. Now you know why we need you back.” Corran tossed the General his blaster pistol, pulled the comlink from his helmet, and clipped it to his flight suit’s lapel. He tossed the helmet on the General’s cot, then
turned and poked his blaster carbine at the guard. “Can you pop the rest of these cells?”
“Some.”
“Good, get them open and I’ll get the rest.” Corran crossed the hallway and started slashing open cells. A motley assembly of individuals slowly shambled out. Some he recognized from his time on
Lusankya.
Forty cells produced a total of ninety prisoners.
“Is this everyone, General?”
Dodonna squinted, then nodded. “We all managed to communicate despite the guards’ best efforts to the contrary. A few here weren’t on the
Lusankya
, but Krennel had them imprisoned for political crimes.”
“Well, you’re all free, courtesy of the New Republic.”
Nrin’s voice rose above the husky cheering. “Corran, come here, fast.”
Corran sprinted back toward the stairwell and immediately identified the reason for Nrin’s yell. Both he and Ooryl stood at the corner hole in the wall, shooting down into the stairwell. Shots were coming back up at them, but they managed to dodge back before any burst could hit them.
Ooryl pointed at the hole. “Guards and stormtroopers have worked their way up the stairs. We’ve been keeping them back. I think they’re going to get a door from below to use as a shield.”
“Got it.” Corran pointed two of the
Lusankya
prisoners at the dead guards. “Get their blasters and come with me.”
He ran over to the stairway and dropped to one knee. He stabbed his lightsaber into the top landing and cored out a big circle. It dropped down three meters, clanging off the heads of some stormtroopers who fell back down the stairs. Thrusting his blaster into the hole, he triggered a burst that danced two guards back against the wall, then left them twitching on the landing a half a floor below.
He leaped back as a flurry of shots burned up at him. The blaster bolts chewed flaming holes in the wall and scattered hot shards of ceramic tile all over. Corran felt a sting on his right cheek and his hand came away bloody. He fired
another burst down the hole, then pulled back and let the two freshly armed prisoners take over.
Halfway between that hole and the other one, he met General Dodonna. The older man studied the situation for a moment, then nodded. “One stairwell was put in to limit access of the prisoners here to any escape routes. If there was a riot, however, the guards probably would have come through the roof to deal with us. Your lightsaber can cut us an opening to get out, but what then?”
Corran shrugged, dousing his lightsaber and hooking it to his belt again. “I don’t know. Let me ask.” He keyed the comlink on his lapel. “Five, we have the prisoners, but can’t get down the northwest stairwell. We’re going to the roof. Can you get us off it?”
“Negative, Nine. Things are hot up here. We’ve got a dozen TIEs inbound and there is ground traffic. Looks like the local answer to CorSec coming to contest your hold on the prison.”
“I’m not liking what you’re saying, Five.”
“I’m not terribly keen on it myself, Nine.” A certain amount of strain came through Tycho’s voice. “Krennel’s got us outgunned up-atmosphere, so you may well be in the best position of all.”
“Youch! I copy, Five. Let me know when help is available.” Glancing over at General Dodonna, he shook his head. “If you have any ideas, General, I’m open to them. After all, you saved the Rebellion at Yavin. By comparison, this should be child’s-play.”
Wedge smiled as he keyed his comlink. “Nine, he saved the Rebellion by putting pilots in the right place at the right time. One Flight is inbound. Standby.” He flicked the comm unit over to the flight frequency. “Two, Three, and Four, join Five and Six tackling those TIEs. I’ll take care of the incoming ground troops.”
“As ordered, Lead.”
The other three Defenders peeled off, breaking starboard
to intercept the TIE formation closing fast on Tycho and Inyri. The Defenders launched a concussion missile each. The projectiles streaked through the sky and hit their targets hard. Three small explosions twinkled brightly and flaming debris fell from the comets that were the burning remains of three TIEs.
Wedge flicked his targeting computer over to ground-search mode and immediately picked up flickering readings from a convoy of landspeeders, a couple of gravtrucks, and a Chariot light assault vehicle. The LAV was the most heavily armored transport in the convoy, but it might as well have been made of flimsiplast as far as its ability to deal with the Defenders’ weapons was concerned.
The commanders of the convoy are likely in that thing, and it looks as though they don’t mind leading from the front. Right idea, just wrong place and time
.
Wedge dialed his throttle back down and brought up the power in the repulsorlift coils. A little rudder straightened him out as his fighter drifted down into a canyon of tall ferrocrete buildings. Half a kilometer east, battering smaller landspeeders out of the way, the Chariot LAV came boiling down the center of the roadway. The wedge-shaped craft used its armored prow to push aside anything blocking the street. Given the slightly erratic path it made, sideslipping left and right down the road, the pilot clearly enjoyed tipping smaller speeders over, dumping them into sidewalks.
Wedge centered his crosshairs over the LAV’s outline and waited until it reached the closer end of an enclosed block before he opened fire with his lasers. The weapons fired sequentially, punching the first two bolts through the transparisteel windscreens, which blackened, then exploded back out in a geyser of golden fire. A third bolt lanced through the starboard repulsorlift engines. They exploded, dropping the craft’s right side to the ground, then slewing it around to the left. The fourth bolt hit the broadsided vehicle in the middle, melting enough of the support structure to crack the Chariot and allow flames to shoot skyward through the gap.
He kicked in a bit more throttle and brought the Defender up so he could shoot over the burning roadblock. He shifted from lasers to ion cannons and fired at the vehicle furthest back in the convoy. His initial shot fell short, but wreathed a gravtruck with blue lightning. It immediately grounded with sparks shooting from the undercarriage.
The guards who had been in the back spilled out, most of them jerking and twitching with the energy. One guard’s clothes were smoldering. He stumbled into the street and the landspeeder following the gravtruck hit him when it swerved to miss the dead truck. The guard pitched up and over the speeder and landed in the road behind it, while the speeder went out of control and slammed into a storefront.
Wedge walked fire back down the convoy, hesitating a couple of times as guards leaped from their gravtrucks and sought shelter in doorways or behind ferrocrete benches or old monuments to Imperial glory. The ion blast would short out a vehicle’s electronics, and wasn’t much kinder to any living creature it hit. He continued to target vehicles, stopping the ones he hit, bottling up the ones he did not.
A few of the men on the ground fired blasters at the Defender. Wedge scattered them with an ion blast and searched for more vehicles to shoot, but something moving through the sky caught his attention. He brought his sensors back into air-to-air mode and directed them at the object lifting from Daplona and heading out toward the prison.
The sensors reported it was an Imperial Assault Shuttle, with shields at full, all four laser cannons charged, and concussion missile launchers in working order, with one life-form on board. Bringing his throttle up, he punched in a request for a comm frequency scan of the ship and switched his comm unit over to the unscrambled one it was using.
“This is General Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. You would be Ysanne Isard.”
There was momentary silence. “General Antilles? I thought you died at Distna.”
“I thought you died at Thyferra, so we’re even.”
Pure venom poured through her voice. “If you think to make this the tiebreaker, you’ll lose.”
Before Wedge could contradict her, fire blossomed in the shuttle’s concussion missile firing tubes. Two missiles jetted out and began a gently curved flight toward the prison’s top floor. “Corran Horn has returned to be with those he escaped,” she hissed, “now it’s time for all of them to die.”
36
Admiral Ackbar climbed back into his command chair. “Damage Control, report.”
A Twi’lek female turned in his direction. “Artificial gravity restored. Hull breaches forward, decks one and three. The
Mrlsst
is dead in space,
Sullust
and
Mantooine
are badly damaged.
Peacemaker
is also dead in space.”
The human at the sensor station raised a hand. “Admiral,
Binder
has brought its gravity well projectors up. Nothing is leaving the system.”
The Mon Calamari nodded slowly. “Signal the fleet. Begin the Thrawn Pincer.”
In waging his war against the New Republic, Grand Admiral Thrawn had proved himself to be a masterful martial tactician. Rumor had it that he credited the study of a people’s art as being the key to understanding and defeating them. Ackbar didn’t know if that were true or not, but what he did understand was that Thrawn had a superior command of how to utilize the tools of his trade. Thrawn had again and again used an Interdictor cruiser as the equivalent of a magnet. He sent it into systems to pull a fleet from hyperspace with more precision than most navigators could plot.
Ackbar had learned well from him.
While Ackbar’s main battle group had jumped directly into the Ciutric system, arriving to the sun side of the planet, the second part of the taskforce had exited hyperspace deeper in the solar system. When the signal from Ackbar reached them, the two
Victory
-class Star Destroyers jumped in toward Ciutric and were dragged from space by
Binder
’s presence.
This brought the two ships out of hyperspace at
Binder
’s aft. The second the crews oriented themselves, General Garm Bel Iblis issued orders to engage the enemy. They unloaded their beam weapons on the
Emperor’s Wisdom
and launched their concussion missiles at
Reckoning
. They did this just after
Reckoning
completed its ninety-degree shift to starboard, presenting its undamaged side to
Home One
, and its unshielded flank to the newly arrived
Selonian Fire
and
Corusca Fire
.
A terrifyingly beautiful garland of explosions rippled down
Reckoning
’s right flank and on up the command tower. Heavy turbolaser batteries disintegrated, hull plates buckled, while even more missiles stabbed deep into the ship’s interior to detonate and tear holes that breached multiple decks. Fires raged as the void of space sucked air out of the ships. Pieces of the hull broke away or twisted out of place, leaving the Impstar looking as if it had sideswiped an asteroid.
One missile shot past the front of the command tower, then course corrected and circled around to strike the forward viewport. The transparisteel resisted the impact at first, but the interior layer cracked and spalled off a hail of crystalline fragments that stormed through the bridge. They passed over the heads of those individuals at the action stations, but blew through Prince-Admiral Krennel so fast that they had exited his back without appreciably slowing down at all.
Krennel looked down to see his white uniform covered with red dots slightly lighter than the scarlet trim on his cuffs and hem. Only his right forearm sleeve remained pristine. He got as far as realizing that it had not changed color
because the arm underneath was purely mechanical, before blood running from his forehead dripped down into his eyes, blinding him.
Then the concussion missile detonated.
The comlink on Corran’s lapel squawked loudly. “Concussion missiles incoming prison east!”
“Everyone, down! Get down!” Corran screamed at them, waving his arms at the ground. “Down, DOWN!”
A missile slammed into the prison at the southeast corner of the fourth floor. Corran saw a brilliant light blossom in that direction and caught a fleeting glimpse of cracks appearing in the mortar between the building blocks that made up the isolation cells. Then the explosion’s shock-wave hit him, blasting him off his feet and knocking him backward into the wall. He saw stars as his head hit, then sputtered as dust from the tops of the hanging lights drifted down to choke him.