[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(105)

Makin’s frustration was getting to her. Unable to fight in his own ship, he was trying to be useful. He put on a head-set and listened to another comm channel, eyes closed.

“Cha, “he said, “I know you’re busy, but have you actually listened to this? The Fourth Fleet elements inside the cordon?”

There were too many ships for her to even begin to monitor voice traffic from individual captains. “No, should I?”

“Yes. It’s… odd.”

Makin didn’t usually talk like that. He was precise and specific. Niathal almost dismissed it, but relented and listened in on the same comm channels.

The mood and tone in the command center of a warship, even in a tight spot, was a lot quieter and more focused than holodramas depicted. Under fire, it was intense, and voices did get raised, but what she heard was not typical of her navy.

One captain was urging cannon teams to blow the Fondorians apart in extremely graphic and profane terms. She winced. “Who’s that?”

“Tarpilan.”

“Is he drunk?” Jun Tarpilan? Never. She didn’t even realize he knew words like that. He was old school, very formal. “That can’t be him.”

“Work through them all. They’re all doing it. It’s like they’ve all gone collectively mad-well, more like they’ve all had a few ales too many and they want to take on the galaxy. And I don’t mean incompetent, either.”

Niathal was starting to worry. The more she listened, the worse it got. Commanders she’d known for years-human, Mon Cal, Sullustan, all species-seemed to have taken on more reckless and aggressive personas. It was no time to dissect this with Makin, but she thought of the things Luke Skywalker had told her about Jacen dabbling in the darker side of the Force. Jedi could carry off some extraordinary sensory manipulation; she would have bet her pension that Jacen could, too.

“I’d use the phrase fighting mad, “she said.

She was cut short by the shipwide comm. “Incoming, brace brace brace.”

Niathal bent her knees and grabbed a rail to buffer the shock. The whole CIC fell quiet apart from the faint hum of electronics, but there was no shiver from a missile or cannon round hitting the shield, so they breathed again. Destroyers like Ocean were well armored and shielded. But nobody was taking anything for granted with an enemy that had produced the galaxy’s most powerful warships and weapons before the Yuuzhan Vong “War.

In the CIC, there were no external viewscreens. The only images of the battle that weren’t translated into sterile graphs, numbers, and moving points of light came from external holocams on every ship or from cockpit cams. Niathal didn’t want to avoid the reality; she felt she was breaking faith with her crews if she couldn’t look at those balls of flame and twisted sections of hull plating spinning off red-hot into space. But to keep fighting these days, she had to find some distance. The small suffering dragged her away from the bigger picture. Then movement on a screen caught her eye and she couldn’t avoid it: a forward view from a cockpit as a fighter crashed into the Fondorian ship it had already ripped into with cannon fire, a sudden zoom-ing image of a Fondorian crest that was leaking flame.

I wasn’t like this when the war started.

“Just as well the Imperials signed up, “Makin said quietly, as they watched the Anakin Solo’s inexorable progress into the inner cordon. “We’d have been sliced and diced by now without them.”

“Good old Gil, “Niathal said, still shaken. “But after this, who’ll be left for Jacen to sign up to make up the numbers?”



ANAKIN SOLO, FONDOR INNER CORDON

The Anakin Solo was in a hurry, and plowed between two orbitals on a direct course for Oridin.

A wave of fighters broke from an attack on the cruiser Armistice-pounding away with turbolasers at a yard that was venting gases into the atmosphere-and headed for the destroyer. Balls of white flame flared and died in the viewscreen, gone in an instant, and Caedus couldn’t tell-with his eyes, at least-if they were fighters exploding or strikes on vessels.

He didn’t need the tracking screen to feel the ships. He was fully battle-aware now, sharing his channeled anger to embolden the commanders in his fleet, and able to shut out anything that was irrelevant to the situation at hand. If Luke tried any more stunts with illusions, he wouldn’t get far.

The adrenaline and pure white rage looping back to him from the individual commanders made his throat tighten. It was almost like a back-pressure effect, that the passion for the battle that he was channeling into them gained power and momentum, and syphoned back into him as a changed and magnified thing that he felt he had to vent from his chest or scream.