When Reya did not fall for the ploy, Jaina checked her tactical display and found a blue storm of Mueum dartships cascading down from the direction of Eyyl and Jwlio-just as promised.
“Sneaky, do an EM sweep of the hull,” Jaina ordered. She still did not see how the arrival of the fresh swarm was going to save Lowbacca and the others. “We might get lucky and locate an energy output that will tell us where those generators are.”
Sneaky whistled an acknowledgment, then the image on her display switched to a rectangular portal set into a field of gray durasteel. The tractor beam itself was invisible, save for a few distortion ripples that suggested it was a very powerful beam indeed-one designed to drag in unwilling ships. As Jaina had feared, the portal was protected by a grid of blue energy-a repulsor screen designed to prevent someone from disabling the beam by dropping a piece of ordnance into it. The Chiss were far too good to overlook something that obvious.
“Go to five mag,” Jaina ordered.
The beam portal grew small in her display, and the white cave of a capture bay appeared beneath it. Jaina could see a pair of weapons turrets flanking a transparisteel viewing panel set high in the innermost wall, but no hint of the tractor beam generator.
Sneaky piped a warning, and Jaina looked up to see the Star Destroyer stretched out before her like the long gray plain of an empty speeder lot. The beam cannons, big and small, remained silent in their sunken firing pits-a sure sign that the gunners still had not detected the approaching StealthXs.
“Anything on that EM sweep, Sneaky?” Jaina asked.
The droid tootled a negative, and Jaina sensed that the same was true for Tesar. It was beginning to look like they would have to do this the hard way. The Jedi would have to eject and destroy their ships.
Tahiri did not want to leave her living ship. It was a gift from Zonama Sekot… and it was a friend.
But her only other choice was to let herself be captured-and Jaina forbade that. She would go EV with Jacen and everyone else. Ten seconds.
Lowbacca did not have ten seconds. Five-if he was lucky.
Three, then.
“Give us eight!” Reya pleaded. No doubt now about whether she could read their emotions in the Force. “The Mueum are almost here.”
Sure-enough time for your friends to capture Lowbacca’s StealthX, Jaina thought. Two seconds.
Tesar urged Jaina to wait. The Mueum were attacking.
Jaina glanced at her display and saw a single, tightly packed arrow of Mueum designators driving through a screen of Chiss clawcraft like a blaster bolt through a tunic. The Star Destroyer opened up with all bearing batteries, hitting the mass with a devastating fusillade that would have torn a minor moon in half.
The Mueum did not even slow down. Long furrows of dartships vanished into fiery nothingness, and the swarm simply flowed into the open spaces, shrinking a little, but continuing toward the Star Destroyer amidships.
“No, Reya!” Jaina ordered. “Stop them!”
Lowbacca went EV, and Jaina lost all hope of bringing the conflict back under control. The Mueum took another volley of laser cannons and continued on as before, coalescing into a single black harpoon aimed at the heart of the Chiss Star Destroyer. Lowbacca’s StealthX detonated in the mouth of the capture bay, taking with it fifty square meters of deck and several dozen dartships, but doing nothing whatsoever to interrupt the tractor beam.
Jaina rolled away from the Star Destroyer and started firing, trying to force as many clawcraft as possible away from Tahiri and the other captured Jedi. Tesar dropped in behind Jaina, firing to kill as a string of brave Chiss pilots jumped on her tail.
Finally, the Mueum reached the Star Destroyer. On her tactical display, Jaina glimpsed the lead dartships crashing into the vessel’s particle shields, vaporizing themselves in an ever-broadening circle of light and fire. She thought for one moment that the suicide attack would come to no more than that; that the entire Mueum swarm would simply smash itself against the powerful Chiss shields.
Then the shields crackled, flashed, and fell. The Mueum assault smashed into the hull in a conflagration of rocket fuel and fire and burned through within seconds. Bodies and equipment began to tumble from the breached hull, but the swarm continued to pour through, streaming through the inner hull and spreading along the corridors to all the hidden corners of the vessel. Within moments, long tongues of flame began to lick out of the gun turrets, and towers of white fire started to shoot from the discharge vents.
A wave of explosions shook the Star Destroyer, and the hull began to come apart. Jaina was shaken by an all-too-familiar wave of anguish and fear, then a rip seemed to open in the Force as the huge vessel began to disintegrate from the inside.