“Now, that, that can only be Intimidator,” Nylykerka pronounced. “All of the late-production Super-class had that additional shield tower located on the centerline—” Shocking as that discovery was, the attention of the audience in the War Hall was quickly drawn elsewhere.
As the counters approached the two-minute mark and the scouts raced toward the midpoint and closest approach of their passes, the display wall was filling with images of warships, until it resembled a larger version of the collage at Nylykerka’s station.
There were Star Destroyers at Wakiza, at Zhina, at New Brigia and Doornik 881, where the Imperial factory farm had been. The Yevethan fleet at Morning Bell now numbered at least sixteen vessels, including four Star
Destroyers, six Aramadia-class
thrustships,
and
a
queer-looking Dreadnaught-scale ship, which Nylykerka excitedly identified as a long-missing Imperial testbed, the EX-F. Other thrustships seemed to be everywhere— orbiting all the other Duskhan League worlds, at Polneye and the former Morath mining operation on Kojash.
Conspicuously missing from the entry scans were the three Imperial shipyards named in Lieutenant Sconn’s deposition: Black Fifteen, which had been located in orbit at N’zoth; Black Eleven, which had been at Zhina; and Black Eight, at Wakiza. Ackbar noted their absence to Han and added, “I do not think we will find them—i do not put it past the Yevetha to have moved the shipyards to concealed locations. I suspect that that is what Astrolabe stumbled on at Doornik Eleven FortytWO.”
At 02:05, the signal from Number 16 at Polneye abruptly terminated, the tracking chart freezing with only forty-two percent of the planet scanned. Moments later Number 19, at Morning Bell, and Number 5, at the Duskhan world Tizon, also went dead.
The losses did not stop there. All over the wall, the individual displays were going blank almost as quickly as they had come to life.
Only half the scouts reached the midpoint of their runs. Three more winked out almost as one as Leia drifted away from Nylykerka and toward the middle of the War Hall.
“What’s going on out there?” she breathed to no one in particular as she stared up at the displays.
The signals from Z’fell, Wakiza, Faz, N’zoth–all assigned to the 21st Recon Group’s X-wings—were among the last to vanish, but vanish they did. No scout managed to scan more than three-fourths of a Duskhan League target before being destroyed.
There was not a sound in the War Hall other than a muffled cough or a furniture creak as the five-minute timer expired. Only four scouts survived to jump out of their target systems—all drones. None had found any thing during their passes, save for newly dead worlds.
Eyes began to turn from the frozen images on the wall to the woman standing alone in the center of the room.
“Now we know,” Leia said simply. “Controller, put the pilots’ visual IDs up while you queue the data from Number One for replay. I’d like us to remember who we owe for this.”
The blast that disabled Rone Taggar’s recon-X came from behind and below, without warning. Even before the cockpit went dark, he could tell from the blue lightning dancing over the cockpit that it was a powerful ion cannon bolt that had overwhelmed the fighter’s shields.
Twisting in his harness, he tried to look back and find his attacker.
There’d been no fire from the ground during the close approach, and he was now out of range for any ordinary ground-based antiship battery.
“Come on, where are you?” he muttered. “Where’d you come from?”
There were dozens of stars bright enough that Taggar could not look directly at them without squinting—more than enough dazzle to hide an interceptor or a defense buoy from his eyes. But he didn’t understand why his targeting system had missed it. The recon-X had the smallest blind spot to the rear of any Republic fighter, and on a normal threat acquisition—at fifty thousand meters or more—he would have bet a month’s pay that he could have held off any equal opponent long enough to finish the run.
Taggar silently counted off the restart interval, fully expecting the killing shot to come before he reached 100.
The absorbers worked passively, soaking up the excess surface charge and using it to feed the restart cell. Its momentum unchanged by the blast, his fighter was still speeding away from N’zoth. With a successful restart, he could grab the last thirty seconds of data on the un-scanned far side and jump away to safety.
The count had reached eighty-seven when he felt the lurch of the tractor beam grabbing hold of his ship. With the spoiler shaking and the fuselage chattering around him, Taggar fished in his chest pocket for the purge stick.