[Black Fleet Crisis

Chapter 1.

Twelve years later

In 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 cne fully loaded-a lesson the Republic had learned in pain. At Orinda, the commander of the fleet carrierEndurance 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 whenEndurance 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 carrierIntrepid . 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.

OnIntrepid’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’Faht’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 fromIntrepid’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.