[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(71)
Pellaeon paused a moment before turning into the passage to face the hatch, and ran his forefinger over his mustache. It had been a long time. He took a breath and walked out to the brow. By now, a small knot of engineering ratings had gathered and were taking an excessive time to check hatch status lights while they stared at a woman who had been walking the decks before any of them were born.
“You haven’t changed one bit, “Pellaeon said, gesturing her on board with a sweep of his arm. “It’s good to see you again, Admiral Daala.”
ANAKIN SOLO, FONDORIAN SPACE, TAPANI SECTOR: 0500 GST
When the Star Destroyer jumped out of the comm silence of hyperspace, Caedus knew that something had not gone precisely to plan.
Battles never do. So we adapt the plan.
The comm boards and screens on the bridge burst into new life with restored connections; officers and senior rates caught up with signals and sitreps delayed by five hours. Caedus felt the mood change on the bridge in the ten paces it took him to reach the status screens, and it wasn’t generated by fear of him. The crew’s attention and growing dis-may was fixed on the updating status reports.
They hunched over scanners and monitor. Caedus walked to the viewport and looked into the starfield, seeking out the disk of Fondor in the foreground. At this distance, it looked as if nothing was happening.
“Sir, we can’t contact the minelayers.”
Caedus glanced over the shoulder of the nearest sensor operator to check the holochart image built up from the real-time scan. There was no sign of the five minelayers; they were supposed to disgorge their clouds of Vigilante mines and pull back to beyond Fondorian space to the RV coordinates. The Anakin Solo should have dropped out of hyperspace right on top of them.
Tahiri hovered at his elbow. He reached into the Force and felt the usual background disturbances of wars: there was fear, anger, danger, destruction, faint echoes of explosions, the same mix of collective emotions and aftermaths that he could sense any day, any hour, if he stopped to think about it.
A Force-user’s ability to sense danger and concealed weapons was a wonderful asset in a Coruscant tapcaf or a strange city, but it was next to useless on a battlefield. Everything was danger and instruments of death; Caedus was a few hundred thousand kilometers off a planet that built warships and was on a high state of alert.
“Sir, Fleet Ops says they had last contact with the minelayers before the jump to hyperspace.” The lieutenant at the electronic warfare station didn’t dare blink as he met Caedus’s eyes. He radiated anxiety, and this time it was personal. “Then nothing, not even an emergency beacon. If they’d returned to Coruscant, they’d be back in port by now.”
The stealth minelayers were small vessels with dispro-portionately powerful drives to enable them to punch in and out of hyperspace close to their target zones; the aim was to spend as little time as possible in realspace to avoid detection, drop the surprise on the enemy’s doorstep, and jump back into hyperspace. With self-deploying networked mines that needed no conventional laying, it should have been a hit-and-run.
“Let me talk to them.” Caedus, still only mildly concerned, took over the comlink to Ops and called up the data flooding in from them with a movement of his forefinger. It disgorged a shimmering list of blue text with times and coordinates of passive position checks of the whole task force, including the outbound minelayers. “Ops, what happened?”
“Colonel Solo, we should have had confirmation of the minelayers’ position and intended movement by now if they completed their mission. We wouldn’t have pinged them at the Fondor end as long as they were on stealth mode, obviously.” There was a brief pause. While the ops room commander seemed to be taking a deep breath, Cae-dus felt a welling of dread around him as if the crew had seen something he hadn’t. “I know this might sound obvious, sir, and I apologize for asking, but can you detect any mines in position?”
Caedus switched back mentally to the ordinary world of the measurable and the detectable. Nobody on the bridge said a word. Yes, they had seen something tangible.
Your fault, Lumiya. You nagged me to stop relying on my mundane senses. I used to check scanners first and the force second. What happened to my intellect?
“Sir, there’s no signal from the mine net for us to activate it, so they never left the hold, and this is the medium-range scan of Fondorian space out to Nallastia.” The lieutenant switched display modes so Caedus could see it not in columns of numbers, but in color-enhanced density and temperature mapping.
Fondor appeared as a patchy disk of temperature gradu-ation with the orbitals passing across its face picked out as more regularly patterned bars-the side-on view of flattened arrowhead-shaped shipyards. But beyond the limb of the planet, the enhanced image showed distinct patches like miniature nebulae. When the lieutenant zoomed in to show Caedus a finer resolution, the patches resolved into concentric rings showing particle density and tiny temperature variations in space.