[Legacy Of The Force] - 07(26)

A moment later the K-wing shuddered slightly and two glowing lines streaked away from its outer wing hardpoints-emissions from the concussion missiles Danen had launched.

The two lines converged in the distance, and, seconds later, ended in what looked like a single detonation.

Oldathan checked his sensor board. It showed the missile paths as lines and reported a distance to target of 321 kilometers.

He swore, swung the nose of his starfighter out of line with his target, and banked to fall in behind the target’s approach path. Now, as he turned back toward the planet, he saw the void as a featureless blackness obscuring the middle of the planet.

“Something’s happening.” Danen’s voice sounded professionally detached. “Sensor readings…”

On Oldathan’s sensor board, a shape appeared for a moment, a huge shape, then disappeared again. Moments later, it returned. … and through the forward canopy he could finally see his target.

It was roughly oval, but very irregular, with a dark, mottled surface. There was activity on its surface, lights igniting. He increased magnification on his visual scanner and could see small craft launching from what looked like a power plant installation on the surface. One vehicle was a shuttle; there were also a dozen or more starfighters and something that looked like a small, highly modified Blockade Runner-style frigate, but with a prow shaped like a balloon instead of a sledgehammer.

Danen no longer sounded matter-of-fact. “Nickel-iron asteroid. Millions of tons.”

“We’ve got to … we’ve got to …” Words failed Oldathan. There was nothing they could do. It would take hours, maybe days, to mount an operation that could divert or destroy such a target. Commenor had no planet-buster weapons, no Death Star main gun, nothing that could cope with this.

As he watched, the fleeing enemy craft cleared well away from the asteroid… and then bright lines appeared on the asteroid’s surface, as though a giant child were scribbling on it with a pen filled with glowing ink.

The asteroid separated into dozens of chunks, each massing hundreds or thousands of tons. They drifted apart, moving in a slow, curiously stately fashion away from the center of the explosion that had shattered the asteroid.

“Got to evacuate…” Helpless, Oldathan shook his head. He had to do something. By an act of will, he got his voice under control again. “Danen, transmit constant sensor feed to Control. Control, here’s what’s coming at you.”

He didn’t have enough firepower to affect any shard of that asteroid. But he could, perhaps, prevent the enemy from using the same equipment to employ the same tactic. He reacquired the flight of enemy starfighters on sensor and swung toward them. “Grayfeathers, join me here. Primary target is the vehicle with the balloon-shaped prow, which I’m assuming is the cloaking mechanism. Secondary is the shuttle. All others insignificant.”

He heard affirmatives from his squadmates.

He pushed them from his mind. He wasn’t likely ever to see them again. But maybe he could delay the enemy’s exit from the system long enough for the other Grayfeathers to reach them, to finish the job he was about to start.

He engaged the K-wing’s auxiliary thruster, the one used for short bursts of acceleration, and roared toward the enemy formation. “Hey, Danen.”

“Yeah.”

“Good working with you.”

“Yeah. You, too.”





Chapter 10


CORUSCANT UNDERCITY, NEAR SENATE BUILDING

Hours after their arrival at their destination, each Jedi was positioned beneath a different plaza-level access cover-except for Seha, who shared Master Katarn’s.

Valin studied his hands. His palms were bandaged over the scrapes and cuts he’d picked up both in getting to this spot and then from the hours of training Seha had put them through, tracing and retracing routes from their assigned stations to the exit point where Master Katarn and Seha were now situated.

But he didn’t mind. Now he suspected that he could make his way back to the exit point if he were blindfolded, during a quake, with a full orchestra blaring away beside him. The only things likely to thwart a mad scramble to the escape route would be the many crawling, venomous denizens to be found in the undercity, so much more numerous since the Yuuzhan Vong had executed their Vongforming of Coruscant and introduced thousands of new species as part of their effort to reshape the world.

Valin hung in a vertical shaft similar to the one Seha had pointed out earlier. Suspended from durasteel access rungs by cables and snap-to climbing hooks, sitting on a broad cloth sling that had been comfortable an hour earlier, he was a bare meter below the exit hatch. In addition to the slicksuit and his backpack, he wore a set of optics-not electrobinoculars, but a holocam monitor structured as a set of goggles. Attached to them was a tiny optic cable that ran up and through the locking mechanism of the access hatch, its tiny holocam end protruding through the other side and oriented toward the main Senate Building entrance. Just now it showed little; there was still an hour or more to go until dawn, and there was little pedestrian or speeder traffic at surface level. Overhead, however, the streams of airspeeder traffic remained constant, multicolored glows of movement in hundreds of trails of light. That was Coruscant, in wartime or peacetime-never asleep, always vividly colorful.