Star Wars: Scourge (44 page)

“Open all hangars,” said Nil Spaar.

Their destination in sight, the transports slowed and began to align themselves on approach vectors.

“Activate all autotargeting batteries,” said Nil Spaar.

There was a collective gasp from the prisoners on the bridge, who were watching the same display screens as the Yevetha commandos who now occupied their stations.

“You’re all cowards,” Commander Paret called out to the invaders, his voice bitter with contempt and anger. “A real soldier would never do this. There’s no honor in killing the defenseless.”

Nil Spaar ignored him. “Lock on targets.”

“You vicious, pathetic fool. You’ve already won. How can you justify this?”

“Fire,” said Nil Spaar.

The deck plates barely vibrated as the gun batteries erupted and the approaching transports disappeared in balls of fire and fragments. It did not take long. None escaped. Moments later the communications station began to scream with shocked and panicked inquiries from all over the ship. There had been many witnesses to the carnage.

Nil Spaar turned away from the tracking display and crossed the bridge to where Commander Paret lay on the decking. Grabbing the Imperial officer by the hair, he dragged Paret out of line and rolled him over roughly with his booted foot. Seizing the front of Paret’s tunic with one hand, Nil Spaar lifted him half off the deck. For a long moment he loomed over the officer, looking like a tall, vengeful demon with his cold, black, widely set eyes, the white slash down his nasal ridge, and the deep scarlet-splashed ridges that furrowed his cheeks and chin.

Then, hissing, the Yevetha made a fist with his free hand and cocked it back. A sharp, curving dew-claw emerged from the swelling at his wrist.

“You are vermin,” Nil Spaar said coldly, and slashed the claw across the Imperial captain’s throat.

Nil Spaar held on through the commander’s death throes, then dropped the body carelessly to the floor. Turning, he looked down into the pit at the commando who had taken over the communications station.

“Tell the crew that they are the prisoners of the Yevetha Protectorate and His Glory the viceroy,” said Nil Spaar, wiping his claw on the trouser leg of his victim. “Tell them that beginning today, their lives depend on their being useful to us. And then I wish to speak to the viceroy, and tell him of our triumph.”

Chapter
1

Twelve years later

I
n the pristine silence of space, the Fifth Battle Group of the New Republic Defense Fleet blossomed over the planet Bessimir like a beautiful, deadly flower.

The formation of capital ships sprang into view with startling suddenness, trailing fire-white wakes of twisted space and bristling with weapons. Angular Star Destroyers guarded fat-hulled fleet carriers, while the assault cruisers, their mirror finishes gleaming, took the point.

A halo of smaller ships appeared at the same time. The fighters among them quickly deployed in a spherical defensive screen. As the Star Destroyers firmed up their formation, their flight decks quickly spawned scores of additional fighters.

At the same time, the carriers and cruisers began to disgorge the bombers, transports, and gunboats they had ferried to the battle. There was no reason to risk the loss of one fully loaded—a lesson the Republic had learned in pain. At Orinda, the commander of the fleet carrier
Endurance
had kept his pilots waiting in the launch bays, to protect the smaller craft from Imperial fire as long as possible. They were still there when
Endurance
took the brunt of a Super Star Destroyer attack and vanished in a ball of metal fire.

Before long more than two hundred warships, large and small, were bearing down on Bessimir and its twin moons. But the terrible, restless power of the armada could be heard and felt only by the ships’ crews. The silence of the approach was broken only on the fleet comm channels, which had crackled to life in the first moments with encoded bursts of noise and cryptic ship-to-ship chatter.

At the center of the formation of great vessels was the flagship of the Fifth Battle Group, the fleet carrier
Intrepid
. She was so new from the yards at Hakassi that her corridors still reeked of sealing compound and cleaning solvent. Her huge realspace thruster engines still sang with the high-pitched squeal that the engine crews called “the baby’s cry.”

It would take more than a year for the mingled scents of the crew to displace the chemical smells from the first impressions of visitors. But after a hundred more hours under way, her engines’ vibrations would drop two octaves, to the reassuring thrum of a seasoned thruster bank.

On
Intrepid
’s bridge, a tall Dornean in general’s uniform paced along an arc of command stations equipped with large monitors. His eye-folds were swollen and fanned by an unconscious Dornean defensive reflex, and his leathery face was flushed purple by concern. Before the deployment was even a minute old, Etahn A’baht’s first command had been bloodied.

The fleet tender
Ahazi
had overshot its jump, coming out of hyperspace too close to Bessimir and too late for its crew to recover from the error. Etahn A’baht watched the bright flare of light in the upper atmosphere from
Intrepid
’s forward viewstation, Knowing that it meant six young men were dead.

But there was no time to linger over the loss. The monitors were flashing images from dozens of scanners on ships and spy satellites at a frenzied pace. Reports from the battle management section changed moment to moment, almost as quickly as the master battle clock counted up the tenths and hundredths.

The assault plan was too intricate and tightly scheduled for a few deaths to stop it. Battle management quickly assigned a reserve fleet tender to
Ahazi
’s section.
May your spirits fly to the zenith and your bodies rest peacefully in the depths
, General A’baht thought, recalling an old Dornean sailors’ blessing for the dead. Then he turned away and studied the order of battle and tactical plan. There would be time to mourn later.

“Penetration phase complete,” sang out a lieutenant at one of the consoles. “Deployment complete. Assault leader is approaching wave-off failsafe and requests final authorization.”

“Penetration complete, copy,” echoed A’baht. “Deployment complete, copy. All stations, call off.”

“Battle management, go.”

“Combat intelligence, go.”

“Tactical, go.”

“Communications, go.”

“Fleet ops, go.”

“Flight ops, go.”

“Ground ops, go.”

“I read the call board as clear,” General A’baht said in a strong, confident voice. “Failsafe authorization is go, combat rules are green—repeat, go green.”

“Authorization is go green, copy,” acknowledged the lieutenant, turning a key on his console. “Assault leader, the word is go—you are clear to proceed. All weapons are live, and the target is hot.”

Almost at once, a trio of assault cruisers and their complement of K-wing bombers broke away and surged ahead of the primary formation. Their new course would take them looping under the planet’s south pole en route to their targets—the primary spacefighter base and planetary defense batteries located on the alpha moon, which was still over the horizon from the armada’s jumppoint.

Pairs of speedy A-wing fighters flashed out of formation and fanned out to intercept and destroy the planet’s lightly armed sensor and communications satellites.
The A-wings fired the first shots of the assault on Bessimir, and did so with unerring accuracy, transforming their targets into sparkling clouds of metal and plasteel.

The A-wings also drew the first opposing fire. Several ion-cannon batteries on the surface opened up in a vain attempt to protect their high-orbiting eyes. Moments after the ground batteries revealed their location, gunners on the lead Republic assault cruisers had them targeted.

High-powered lasers on the cruisers painted the batteries, blinding ground sensors and testing for counterpunch fire from secondary sites. When there was none, the great pulse cannon mounted aboard the Star Destroyers methodically turned the ground batteries into smoking black craters. The only casualty for the Republic was an A-wing from Blackfire Flight, which picked up a sleeper mine on the right wing while making its pass against a recon satellite.

On the far side of Bessimir, the cruiser detachment approached the alpha moon on a high-speed collision course. As drone fighters appeared from concealed launch chutes on the surface, the big ships fanned out three abreast and began releasing clusters of penetration bombs.

Tall as a man and tipped by a reinforced spike, the black-cased bombs sped down toward the fighter base as the cruisers veered off. The drone fighters rising from the moon veered off as well. Moments later a dozen antiship batteries on the surface surrendered their camouflage, opening fire on the infalling bombs.

But the penetration bombs—propelled only by inertia, and with their casings as dark and nearly as cold as space itself—did not offer much of a target. Most fell through the defensive barrage unmolested. Two seconds before impact, small thrusters in the tail of each bomb fired, slamming them into the surface at even greater speed and driving them twice their length into the barren ground.

A moment later, with the dust of impact still rising, the bombs exploded as one. The flash and flame were swallowed by the moon’s face. But the terrible concussion propagated downward and outward through the rock. It shattered reinforced walls like matchsticks, and collapsed underground chambers like eggshells. Great plumes of gray dust shot out of the launch chutes, and the ground itself subsided over what had been the main hangar.

At the moment the bombs exploded, Esege Tuketu was flying lead in an eighteen-ship formation following the cruisers toward the alpha moon. “Sweet mother of chaos,” he breathed, awestruck by the sight. For just a moment, he took his hands off the controls of his K-wing and lowered his forehead against his crossed wrists—the Narvath gesture of surrender to the fire that consumes all.

From the second seat of Tuketu’s bomber came an equally heartfelt and respectful “Wow!” voiced by his weapons technician. “And I don’t care what they say,” he added. “I felt that one.”

“Seemed like I did, too, Skids,” said Tuketu.

“No one had a better seat for it than we did, that’s for sure.”

They watched carefully ahead with eyes as well as passive scanners. No more fighters emerged from the hidden base. The antiship batteries were still.

But the drone fighters already launched fought on, even though deprived of their controllers. Following internal combat protocols, they flung themselves against the largest targets, the cruisers. Agile but lightly armed, the drones did not last long. The cruisers batted them down like so many insects.

“Good shooting!” Tuketu exclaimed. None of the other crews in the formation heard him. The attack force was following blackout protocols—including strict comm silence, despite the close formation and the critical timing of what lay ahead.

“This is going to work,” the weapons tech said hopefully. “Isn’t it?”

“It has to,” said Tuketu, thinking about what lay ahead.

Only one real threat to the fleet remained—the great hypervelocity gun on the far side of the gravity-locked moon. Like a swift-footed sentry making its rounds, the alpha moon would soon revolve around Bessimir to a point where the HV gun would have its pick of targets in the fleet.

According to the New Republic’s surveillance droids, the gun emplacement was both ray-shielded and particle-shielded. Moreover, with the weapon’s power plants and shield generator buried deep in the rock, it could easily survive the sort of assault that had destroyed the fighter base. If Etahn A’baht’s capital ships had to slug it out with the alpha moon’s big gun, the Fifth Battle Group would surely lose several ships in the process. The key to avoiding that outcome lay with Tuketu’s eighteen bombers.

“Coming up on the break,” said Skids, glancing at the mission clock and then at the broken surface of the alpha moon, rushing toward them.

“I’m on top of it,” said Tuketu.

“You’d better be,” was the nervous reply. “My mama’s counting on me doing more with my life than making a hole in the ground someplace where they already got enough holes in the ground.”

“Break in ten,” said Tuketu. “Signaling the others. Break in five.” A collision alarm began to sound in the cockpit. The moon’s surface seemed terribly close. “Break!”

The entire spaceship shuddered as the emergency deceleration thrusters roared and the nose of the K-wing swung up toward the horizon. Tuketu and Skids were slammed back into their flight couches as the moon rotated dizzily under them. Breathing came hard throughout the long moments of the pullout.

When the ship stopped shaking and it was possible to breathe again, Tuketu’s ship was skimming the surface of the alpha moon with only two other bombers nestled in behind. The K-wings had scattered in six
groups, each taking a different compass heading to the target. With luck, they would meet again over the aperture of the electromagnetic gun.