[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(116)

Taggar tried to whistle past the graveyard, but his mouth was suddenly too dry.

There had been a tug-of-war between Leia and Ackbar over who would be invited to be in the War Hall at Fleet Headquarters when the data from the Koornacht recon incursion came in.

“This is not the time to repay favors or curry favor,” Ackbar had said, holding out for keeping the list as short as possible. “You cannot control information that’s already been freely distributed. We will need time to evaluate the data and place it in context.”

“Everyone on that list has a legitimate right to know what’s going on in Farlax,” she had argued. “They’re all going to have to be part of the decisions to come—Defense Council, Security Council, the rest of the Ruling Council, Rieekan from NRI. It’s not as though I’m trying to bring in outsiders.”

“No,” Ackbar said. “You are only bringing in a senator who just tried to have you removed from office, and another who is likely to try in the near future. They are part of the same government as you, Leia, but they are not your allies.”

Behn-kihl-nahm’s opinion had settled the question in favor of Leia’s side. As the intercepts neared, the room was full of extra bodies, and there was more than enough to occupy them.

The full-wall display in the War Hall had been divided into twenty-four identical rectangles. Each contained an intercept chart, with a blank circle representing the target planet and a red line marking the expected path of the scout. As the contacts proceeded, the charts would change to show the position of the ships and the progress of the scans.

Beside each chart was space for a flat-screen feed from the scout’s imagers. At the moment the name of the target World and the type of scout assigned to it were displayed in that space.

Ackbar, Leia, and Han stood together at the back of the room, leaning on the railing at the edge of the raised observer’s platform and watching twenty-four timers counting down in synchrony.

“It kind of reminds me of a tout board I saw at a million-credit betting parlor on Bragkis,” Han said, “and everyone standing around waiting for the race to begin. ‘Who’s got a favorite?” ‘What odds will you give me on Wakiza? “” Leia usually found Han’s irreverence refreshing. But she had no patience for it just then and walked away after shooting him a hot sidewise glare. Han’s first instinct was to follow, but Ackbar stayed him with a touch.

“Let her be,” he said. “This is a hard time. She does not have much water under her.”

The room quieted dramatically in the last seconds, as everyone working attended to the console before them, and everyone watching turned away from their conversations and looked up toward the display. As zero turned to plus-1, the entire wall came alive with moving images as the charts began to change and the first images arrived.

It almost seemed to Han as though the wall were a squirming mass of tiny creatures made of light. Unless he focused his attention on just one area, the effect made his stomach turn and his nerves jangle.

Ackbar raised a hand and pointed to the lower right corner of the wall.

“One casualty already,” he said.

Number 23, a pilotless ferret, had missed its rendezvous at Doornik 207, which at last report had been host to a nest of Corasgh. But all the other charts were beginning to fill in—the flight tracks changing from red to green, the faces of the planets beginning to be shaded in.

The early images from N’zoth caused a buzz in the room. They showed the unmistakable shapes of Star Destroyers, singled out by the R2-controlled imaging systems on Rone Taggar’s Jennie Lee. After leaving Han, Leia had gone to stand by Ayddar Nylykerka, who was busily capturing individual frames from the data into a collage of ship portraits. She listened in while the intense little analyst from the Asset Tracking Office talked aloud to himself.

“That could be the Redoubtable,” he muttered, consulting his lists.

“It’s definitely early Imperial-class, despite the modifications to the forward superstructure-” The buzz turned into a dark murmur a few seconds later, when the view from Number 1 changed and another, sleeker dagger shape snapped into focus. There was hardly a person in the room who could not identify that profile, and the exceptions quickly learned the significance in a hasty whisper from a companion: there was a Super Star Destroyer in orbit around N’zoth.

From the beginning, the New Republic had opted to build a larger number of smaller vessels—Fleet carriers, Republic-class Star Destroyers, battle cruisers—rather than adopt the Imperial design philosophy. Mon Mothma had given orders to scrap rather than repair or make a museum piece of the sole SSD captured from the Empire. Consequently, the eight-kilometer-long behemoth circling N’zoth had anything in the New Republic Fleet badly outgunned.